A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY
Browse by Title
95 scholarly books by Leiden University Press
95 scholarly books by Leiden University Press
Akragas
Current Issues in the Archaeology of a Sicilian Polis
Edited by Natascha Sojc
Leiden University Press, 2017
Over the past few years, the archaeological and architectural investigation of ancient Akragas, an ostentatiously wealthy city-state on the site of modern-day Agrigento in Sicily, has gathered new momentum. This book brings together various researchers who investigate the city’s Greek period remains. The issues discussed range from methodological approaches and the interpretation of fresh field-data to concerns of site maintenance and the reconstruction of monuments. The contributors to this volume offer perspectives for further research on the monuments, finds, and contexts from ancient Akragas. These extend beyond strictly archaeological concerns, and as manifested by Agrigento’s status as a UNESCO World Heritage site.
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Animals in Dutch Travel Writing, 1800-present
Rick Honings
Leiden University Press
Apart from humans, animals play a pivotal role in travel literature. However, the way they are represented in texts can vary from living companions to metaphorical entities. Existing studies mainly focus on the representation of conventional or unconventional roles that are assigned to animals from around the Napoleonic age until now, roles that have been subject to change and that tell us a lot about human reflections on encounters with non-human creatures and the position of man in this rapidly changing world. In this edited volume, scholars from the Netherlands and abroad analyse the roles that animals play in Dutch travel literature from 1800 to the present. In this way, we aim to provide new insights into the relationships between man and animals, in textual expressions and real life, and to add the ‘Dutch case’ to the flourishing international field of travel writing studies.
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Applying Sharia in the West
Facts, Fears and the Future of Islamic Rules on Family Relations in the West
Edited by Maurits S. Berger
Leiden University Press, 2013
Shari’a, the framework of Islamic rules and norms, governs many aspects of human behavior. The contributors to Applying Shari’a in the West examine in depth how Muslims in the West shape their normative behavior on the basis of Shari’a and how Western societies and legal systems react thereto. With its explicit focus on social and family relations, these country and thematic studies provide a timely overview of the current state of Shari’a and outline aspects of possible future developments, studies, and policies.
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The Asian Studies Parade
Archival, Biographical, Institutional and Post-Colonial Approaches
Paul van der Velde
Leiden University Press, 2023
The Asian Studies Parade reflects a lifetime of commitment to the field by Paul van der Velde, a leading Asian studies innovator, scholar, and publisher. The first chapters examine aspects of the Dutch colonial presence in Asia and its intellectual support system in the Netherlands. The author’s engagement with historical biography emerges in studies of such contrasting figures as Japanese interpreter Imamura Gen’emon Eisei, pioneering anthropologist P.J. Veth, and anti-colonialist Jacob Haafner. Van der Velde then continues to describe the development of Asia-Europe links at the end of the 20th century and the emergence of the ‘New Asia Scholar’ in the 21st century. This unique work will interest anyone concerned with wider issues in Asian studies.
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Atlas of Material Life
Northwestern Europe and East Asia, 15th to 19th century
Peer Vries and Annelieke Vries
Leiden University Press, 2020
A comparative history of material life in western Europe and East Asia.
Large-scale comparative economic history of westernmost and easternmost Eurasia provides insight into our global history. Atlas of Material Life highlights the main characteristics of the economic landscape in Great Britain, the Netherlands, China, and Japan between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries. It demonstrates the constraints to which all pre-industrial economies were subjected but also the different ways in which the societies discussed dealt with those challenges. Replete with maps, graphs, and accessible figures, this transnational study offers fresh insight into the economy of limited possibilities and humanity’s ever-evolving relationship to resources.
Large-scale comparative economic history of westernmost and easternmost Eurasia provides insight into our global history. Atlas of Material Life highlights the main characteristics of the economic landscape in Great Britain, the Netherlands, China, and Japan between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries. It demonstrates the constraints to which all pre-industrial economies were subjected but also the different ways in which the societies discussed dealt with those challenges. Replete with maps, graphs, and accessible figures, this transnational study offers fresh insight into the economy of limited possibilities and humanity’s ever-evolving relationship to resources.
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Ayatollah Khomeini’s Mystical Poetry and its Reception in Iran and the Diaspora
Diede Farhosh-Van Loon
Leiden University Press, 2023
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 investigates how Khomeini integrated various doctrines and ideas of Islamic mysticism and Shiiism such as the Perfect Man into his poetry.
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Being a Slave
Histories and Legacies of European Slavery in the Indian Ocean
Edited by Alicia Schrikker and Nira Wickramasinghe
Leiden University Press, 2020
This multidisciplinary volume brings together scholars and writers who try to come to terms with the histories and legacies of European slavery in the Indian Ocean. The volume discusses a variety of qualitative data on the experience of being a slave in order to recover ordinary lives and, crucially, to place this experience in its Asian local context. Building on the rich scholarship on the slave trade, this volume offers a unique perspective that embraces the origin and afterlife of enslavement as well as the imaginaries and representations of slaves rather than the trade in slaves itself. From Cape to Batavia, slavery is understood as a diffuse practice. This approach helps unearth 18th and 19th century experiences of being a slave in the Indian Ocean world, but also sheds light on continuities in bondage into the present. Contributors force an often hostile archive to extract traces of the lived experience of slavery in court records, petitions or private letters. They also listen to local voices by prying unexplored primary sources such as oral histories, memories and objects.
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Being Muslim in Indonesia
Religiosity, Politics and Cultural Diversity in Bima
Muhammad Adlin Sila
Leiden University Press, 2021
How people in the world’s largest Muslim country negotiate religious identities.
There are many ways of being Muslim in Indonesia, where more people practice Islam than anywhere else in the world. In Being Muslim in Indonesia, Muhammad Adlin Sila reveals the ways Muslims in one city constitute unique religious identities through ritual, political, and cultural practices. Emerging from diverse contexts, the traditionalist and reformist divide in Indonesian Islam must be understood through the sociopolitical lens of its practitioners—whether royalty, clerics, or laity.
There are many ways of being Muslim in Indonesia, where more people practice Islam than anywhere else in the world. In Being Muslim in Indonesia, Muhammad Adlin Sila reveals the ways Muslims in one city constitute unique religious identities through ritual, political, and cultural practices. Emerging from diverse contexts, the traditionalist and reformist divide in Indonesian Islam must be understood through the sociopolitical lens of its practitioners—whether royalty, clerics, or laity.
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Big Books in Times of Big Data
Inge Van de Ven
Leiden University Press, 2019
This book explores the aesthetics, medial affordances, and cultural economics of monumental literary works of the digital age and offers a comparative and cross-cultural perspective on a wide range of contemporary writers. Using an international archive of hefty tomes by authors such as Mark Z. Danielewski, Roberto Bolaño, Elena Ferrante, Karl Ove Knausgård, George R.R. Martin, Jonathan Franzen, and William T. Vollmann, van de Ven investigates multiple strands of bigness that speak to the tenuous position of print literature in the present but also to the robust stature of literary discourse within our age of proliferating digital media. Her study makes a case for the cultural agency of the big book—as a material object and a discursive phenomenon, entangled in complex ways with questions of canonicity, materiality, gender, and power. Van de Ven takes us into a contested terrain beyond the 1,000-page mark, where issues of scale and reader comprehension clash with authorial aggrandizement and the pleasures of binge reading and serial consumption.
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A Brief History of Islam in Europe
Thirteen Centuries of Creed, Conflict and Coexistence
Maurits S. Berger
Leiden University Press, 2014
The relationship between Europe and Islam has been complicated, if not troubled, throughout the thirteen centuries since Muslims first began playing a part in European history. This volume offers a compact, yet comprehensive look at the entire history of the interaction of Islam and Eureopean culture, religion, and politics.
Maurits S. Berger focuses in particular on the transformations that the figure of the Muslim and the image of Islam have undergone in the European mind. Conqueror, Antichrist, scholar, benign ruler, corsair, tradesman, fellow citizen—the Muslim has been all of those and more, and even today, as Muslims make up a substantial portion of Europe’s citizenry, they remain all too often a source of undeserved anxiety for ordinary people and politicians alike. Through Berger’s clear prose and incisive analysis, the story of Islam and Europe is seen as one of interaction and mutual influence rather than perpetual antagonism.
Maurits S. Berger focuses in particular on the transformations that the figure of the Muslim and the image of Islam have undergone in the European mind. Conqueror, Antichrist, scholar, benign ruler, corsair, tradesman, fellow citizen—the Muslim has been all of those and more, and even today, as Muslims make up a substantial portion of Europe’s citizenry, they remain all too often a source of undeserved anxiety for ordinary people and politicians alike. Through Berger’s clear prose and incisive analysis, the story of Islam and Europe is seen as one of interaction and mutual influence rather than perpetual antagonism.
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Bureaucrats of Liberation
Southern African and American Lawyers and Clients During the Apartheid Era
Myra Ann Houser
Leiden University Press, 2020
Bureaucrats of Liberation narrates the history of the Southern Africa Project of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Right under law, a civil rights organization founded in 1963 at the request of President John F. Kennedy. Between 1963 and 1994, the Southern Africa Project connected lawyers from Namibia, South Africa, and the United States. Within the Project’s network, activist lawyers exchanged funding resources, provided logistical support for political trials, and mediated new voting and governmental systems.
The Project’s history provides a lens into twentieth century geopolitics tied to anti-apartheid, decolonization, Cold War, and movements agitating against white supremacy. In doing so, it pays careful attention to the Project’s different eras, beginning with US Executive Branch officials helming the effort and evolving into a space where more activist-oriented attorneys on both sides of the Atlantic drove its mission and politics.
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Cape Conflict
Protest and Political Alliances in a Dutch Settlement
Teun Baartman
Leiden University Press, 2019
From 1652 until 1795, the Cape of Good Hope was a Dutch settlement marked by tensions, often portrayed as antagonism between the oppressive Dutch East India Company (VOC) and the Cape’s aggrieved burghers. However, by comparing the political structures, institutions and dynamics of the Dutch Republic and its overseas settlement, the Teun Baartman demonstrates that this relationship was more cooperative and that the Cape burghers were able to influence policies in their favor similar to the way burghers in the Dutch Republic did by forming political factions. Using the Cape Conflict of the later eighteenth century as a case study, Baartman illustrates that it was in fact a fight for power between factions within the ruling elite, which consisted of both VOC officials and burghers. This book offers new evidence, a variety of interpretations, and an innovative narrative about where burghers came from, what their position was, and how the Cape political world operated.
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Caribbean Cultural Heritage and the Nation
Aruba, Bonaire and Curaçao in a Regional Context
Alex van Stipriaan
Leiden University Press
Centuries of intense and involuntary migrations deeply impacted the development of the creolised cultures on the Dutch Caribbean islands of Aruba, Bonaire, and Curaçao. This volume describes various forms of cultural heritage produced on these islands over time and whether these heritages are part of their ‘national’ identifications. What forms of heritage express the idea of a shared “we” (nation-building) and what images are presented to the outside world (nation-branding)? What cultural heritage is shared between the islands and what are some real or perceived differences? In this book, examples of cultural heritage on these three islands ranging from sports to questions of reparations, from museums to digital humanities, from archaeology to music, from language and literature to tourism, and from visual art to diaspora policies are compared to developments elsewhere in the Caribbean.
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Changes in the Cultural Landscape and their Impacts on Heritage Management
A Study of Dutch Fort at Galle, Sri Lanka
Uditha Jinadasa
Leiden University Press, 2020
This book focuses on the practical challenges of managing a World Heritage listed historic city in a South Asian context. The focal point of the author’s research is Sri Lanka’s Galle Fort, a walled town, identified as the best-preserved colonial fort in South Asia. The costs and benefits of the fort’s World Heritage recognition to its local urban community, and to the colonial fort itself, are analyzed. Shown is how thirty years of the World Heritage project at Galle Fort changed a once small seaside walled town with dilapidated colonial buildings into a tourist hot-spot and prime real estate, thereby changing the lives of its inhabitants. It argues that the best practices of participatory and people-centered approaches of managing urban heritage at the global level are slow to progress at a local level.
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Clothes Make the Man
Early Medieval Textiles from the Netherlands
Chrystel R. Brandenburgh
Leiden University Press, 2017
Textiles that have been uncovered in archaeological excavations include garments, household fabrics, and sails. But until now, systematic analyses of such discoveries had not yet been undertaken for Dutch artifacts. Closing this considerable gap, Clothes Make the Man focuses on textile remains dating from between 400 and 1000 CE that have been recovered from settlements and cemeteries in what is now the Netherlands. As Chrystel R. Brandenburgh shows, such fabrics enable valuable reconstructions of burial clothing and yield important data about their production processes and techniques.
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Colonialism and Slavery
An Alternative History of the Port City of Rotterdam
Gert Oostindie
Leiden University Press, 2021
Unlike most city histories, this book focuses exclusively on the city’s connections with colonialism and slavery. Rotterdam, the second-largest Dutch city, is one of Europe’s leading ports. 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 uneasily with the city’s modern cosmopolitan image and its large population of ‘new Rotterdammers’ with colonial roots. The present volume provides a summary of the research that has documented this history, with chapters on the contribution of colonial trade to economic development; the city’s involvement in slavery; the role of the urban political elites; the impact on urban development and architecture; the ‘ethical impulse’; colonial art and ethnographic collections; colonial and postcolonial migration; and finally the resonance of this history in postcolonial Rotterdam.
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The Colonization of Freed African Americans in Suriname
Archival Sources relating to the U.S.-Dutch Negotiations, 1860-1866
Michael J. Douma
Leiden University Press, 2019
During the American Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln’s administration engaged in protracted negotiations with representatives of the Netherlands to aid in the voluntarily colonization of free African Americans to Suriname. Scores of diplomatic letters in Dutch, English, and French, dating to the period 1862 to 1866 attest to the very real possibility that such migration stream could have become a reality. They also indicate reasons why this scheme failed: it was bogged down by differences of opinion, mail delays, and ultimately a reluctance of any African Americans to migrate. Previously unpublished and unknown, these letters have been transcribed and translated here for the first time. The sources provide a rare look inside the minds of liberal government officials during the age of emancipation in the Atlantic World. They demonstrate the officials’ humanitarian concerns, their racial prejudices, respect for legal order and process, and faith in governments to solve international problems.
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The Company Fortress
Military Engineering and the Dutch East India Company in South Asia, 1638-1795
Erik Odegard
Leiden University Press, 2020
The remains of Dutch East India Company forts are scattered throughout littoral Asia and Africa. But how important were the specific characteristics of European bastion-trace fortifications to Early-Modern European expansion? Was European fortification design as important for Early-Modern expansion as has been argued? This book takes on these questions by studying the system of fortifications built and maintained by the Dutch East India Company (VOC) in present-day India and Sri Lanka. It uncovers the stories of the forts and their designers, arguing that many of these engineers were in fact amateurs and their creations contained serious flaws. Subsequent engineers were hampered by their disagreement over fortification design: there proved not to be a single “European school” of fortification design. The study questions the importance of fortification design for European expansion, shows the relationship between siege and naval warfare, and highlights changing perceptions by the VOC of the capabilities of new polities in India in the late eighteenth century.
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Conflict and Development in Iranian Film
Edited by A. A. Seyed-Gohrab and Kamran Talattof
Leiden University Press, 2013
The contributors to this timely volume explore the philosophical underpinnings and cinematic techniques characteristic of contemporary Iranian film. Collectively, they demonstrate how the pervasive themes of Iranian cinema—such as martyrdom and war, traditional gender roles and their recent subversion, as well as broader social policy issues—have been addressed and how various directors, including the acclaimed Abbas Kiarostami, have approached them using a variety of techniques. Capturing the unique poetic and mystical dimensions of Iranian cinema, these essays consider the effects of the Islamic Revolution on cinema’s ethical and aesthetic aspects.
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Courtly Riddles
Enigmatic Embellishments in Early Persian Poetry
Asghar Seyed-Gohrab
Leiden University Press, 2010
This book is the first study of Persian literary riddles to appear in English, analysing a wide range of complex riddling poems systematically from the tenth to the twelfth century. In addition to the genre of riddles, the book examines the relationship between metaphors and riddles and the genre of literary description. Riddles belong to the oldest genre in many literary traditions. Riddles were composed at courts in the Iranian world for various purposes, such as highlighting the courtly insignia that refer to the ruler’s administrative and military power. The aesthetic of puzzlement was much appreciated at courts. Through a riddle, the poet aims to demonstrate his artistic accomplishment in a short space; and at the same time he secures his social, professional and personal position at the court and in cultured circles. Literary riddles occur in the early specimens of Persian literature from the tenth century and they continue to be used in modern Iranian society.
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Creating Capitals
The Rationale, Construction, and Function of the Imperial Capitals of Assyria
Aris Politopoulos
Leiden University Press, 2020
An archaeological history of the Assyrian Empire’s four capitals.
The Assyrian Empire moved and rebuilt its capital city three times—at Kar-Tukulti-Ninurta, Kalhu, Dur-Šarruken, and Nineveh. Creating Capitals explores why and how Assyria constructed these capitals as well as how they functioned within the empire. Drawing on extensive research, Aris Politopoulos offers a sweeping comparative analysis of these four ancient cities and proposes a new framework for understanding the construction of capitals in human history.
The Assyrian Empire moved and rebuilt its capital city three times—at Kar-Tukulti-Ninurta, Kalhu, Dur-Šarruken, and Nineveh. Creating Capitals explores why and how Assyria constructed these capitals as well as how they functioned within the empire. Drawing on extensive research, Aris Politopoulos offers a sweeping comparative analysis of these four ancient cities and proposes a new framework for understanding the construction of capitals in human history.
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De la Gloria al olvido
Estudio arqueológico de la primera ciudad española fundada en la Tierra Firme de América:Santa María de la Antigua del Darién
Alberto Sarcina
Leiden University Press, 2020
Designating Place
Archaeological Perspectives on Built Environments in Ostia and Pompeii
Edited by Hans Kamermans and L. Bouke van der Meer
Leiden University Press, 2020
A collection of diverse archaeological approaches to Roman cities.
Designating Place showcases the diverse ways archaeologists approach ancient urban spaces—including geophysical, spatial, iconographic, and epigraphic analyses. Drawing on techniques as wide-ranging as Space Syntax, shallow seismic reflection surveys, linguistic landscape studies, and collective memory studies, this international team of scholars presents the latest insights from cutting-edge research into urban societies near Rome and Pompeii.
Designating Place showcases the diverse ways archaeologists approach ancient urban spaces—including geophysical, spatial, iconographic, and epigraphic analyses. Drawing on techniques as wide-ranging as Space Syntax, shallow seismic reflection surveys, linguistic landscape studies, and collective memory studies, this international team of scholars presents the latest insights from cutting-edge research into urban societies near Rome and Pompeii.
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Discourses of Disruption in Asia
Creating and Contesting Meaning in the Time of COVID-19
Michael Ewing
Leiden University Press
East Asia beyond the Archives
Missing Sources and Marginal Voices
Catherine S. Chan
Leiden University Press
Economic Diversity in Contemporary Timor-Leste
Kelly Silva
Leiden University Press, 2023
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 responded to these transformations. The collection challenges hegemonic, market-driven analyses which characterise Timor-Leste’s economy as weak, deformed and homogenised and demonstrates the myriad of socially embedded ways through which Timor-Leste’s economy is diverse, richly complex and continually brought into being. To frame the analysis of these complex economic dynamics in Timor-Leste, the collection’s introduction develops the concept of economic ecologies: the assemblages of institutions and their localised and historical relationships mobilised for reproducing collective life, both in its material and immaterial aspects.
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Egypt beyond Representation
Materials and Materiality of Aegyptiaca Romana
Sander Müskens
Leiden University Press, 2017
Egypt beyond Representation develops and applies a new approach to study Aegyptiaca Romana from a bottom-up, Roman perspective. Current approaches to these objects are often still plagued by top-down projections of modern definitions and understandings of Egypt and Egyptian material culture onto the Roman world. This book instead argues that these artifacts should be studied in their own right, without reducing them to fixed Egyptian meanings. This study shows that, while “Egyptianness” may have been among Roman associations, these objects were able to do much more than merely representing notions of Egypt.
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Embodiments of Evil
Gog and Magog: Interdisciplinary Studies of the "Other" in Literature & Internet Texts
Edited by A. A. Seyed-Gohrab, F. Doufikar-Aerts, and S. McGlinn
Leiden University Press, 2011
One Word – Yak Kaleme was one of the first treatises in the Middle East to demonstrate that Islam is compatible with the introduction of modern western forms of government, and specifically that the principles of the sharia can be incorporated in a codified law comparable to that found in European countries. This was a daring argument in the late 19th century, when it was extremely difficult to convince the rulers and religious class that a civil code of law was needed: would it not diminish the status of the ruler, and would it not be an admission that the religious law, the sharia, was deficient?
The author, Mirza Yu¯suf Kha¯n Mustashar al-Dawla (d. 1895), was a liberal-minded bureaucrat campaigning for reform of the absolutist system and the creation of one based on European principles of government. He held several posts abroad including St Petersburg (1854-62), and Paris (1867-71), as well as carrying out administrative duties in Iran itself.
In One Word he argues that the principles underlying constitutional government can be found in Islamic sources, particularly in the Quran and traditions of the Prophet. Unlike some Oriental travellers to Europe at that time, he observed that European dominance was not derived from a few technological advances, but primarily from the organisation of society, on the basis of codified law. One Word was a significant text in the lead-up to the Iranian Constitutional Revolution of 1906, but its message is relevant today.
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Ending Famine in India
A Transnational History of Food Aid and Development, c. 1890-1950
Joanna Simonow
Leiden University Press, 2023
The task of ending famine in India was taken up by many at the beginning of the twentieth century. Only decades earlier, famine in India had been believed to be a necessary evil. Now it was the reason for the increasing activities of doctors, nutritionists, social reformers, agricultural experts, missionaries, anti-colonial activists and colonial administrators, all involved in temporary relief and finding permanent solutions to famine.
The involvement of this panoply of historical actors places Indian famines in the centre of the converging histories of humanitarianism, development, nutrition and (anti-) colonialism. Tracing their activities renders such convergences visible and pushes the boundaries of the history of famines in South Asia beyond its common spatial and temporal frames. Ending Famine in India examines the tripartite relationship of India, Britain and the United States, linking the late-Victorian holocausts with the struggle for food security in the 1950s.
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The E-Primer
An Introduction to Creating Psychological Experiments in E-Prime®
Michiel Verdonschot
Leiden University Press, 2019
E-Prime® is the leading software suite by Psychology Software Tools for designing and running Psychology lab experiments. The E-Primer is the perfect accompanying guide: It provides all the necessary knowledge to make E-Prime accessible to everyone. You can learn the tools of Psychological science by following the E-Primer through a series of entertaining, step-by-step recipes that recreate classic experiments. The updated E-Primer expands its proven combination of simple explanations, interesting tutorials and fun exercises, and makes even the novice student quickly confident to create their dream experiment.
Featuring:
* Learn the basic and advanced features of E-Studio’s flexible user interface
* 15 step-by-step tutorials let you replicate classic experiments from all Psychology fields
* Learn to write custom code in E-Basic without having any previous experience in programming
* Second edition completely revised for E-Prime 3
* Based on 10+ years of teaching E-Prime to undergraduates, postgraduates, and colleagues
* Used by Psychology Software Tools to train their own staff!
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The Exposition of Artistic Research
Publishing Art in Academia
Edited by Michael Schwab and Henk Borgdorff
Leiden University Press, 2014
The Exposition of Artistic Research: Publishing Art in Academia introduces the pioneering concept of ‘expositions’ in the context of art and design research, where practice needs to be exposed as research to enter academic discourse. It brings together reflective and methodological approaches to exposition writing from a variety of artistic disciplines including fine art, music and design, which it links to questions of publication and the use of technology. The book proposes a novel relationship to knowledge, where the form in which this knowledge emerges and the mode in which it is communicated makes a difference to what is known.
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The Fall and Rise of Blasphemy Law
Edited by Paul Cliteur and Tom Herrenberg
Leiden University Press, 2017
In contemporary politics two conflicting trends have influenced freedom of expression. The first confirms that many Western countries have become less strict about sacrilegious expression and repealed their blasphemy laws or withdrew much of their punishment for blasphemy. Yet the second trend manifests in an opposing movement, often couched in terms of religious freedom, which attempts to reconcile free speech with freedom of religion by punishing expressions deemed, for instance, “hate speech.” With contributions by scholars from a wide range of disciplines, this book offers an examination of topical issues relating to both of these movements, looking at freedom of expression, censorship, and blasphemy in contemporary multicultural democracies.
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Father of Persian Verse
Rudaki and his Poetry
Edited by Sassan Tabatabai
Leiden University Press, 2010
Abu ‘Abdollâh’ Jafar ibn Mohammad Rudaki (c. 880 CE-941 CE) was a poet to the Samanid court which ruled much of Khorâsân (northeastern Persia) from its seat in Bukhara.
He is widely regarded as “the father of Persian poetry, for he was the first major poet to write in New Persian language, following the Arab conquest in the seventh and eighth centuries, which established Islam as the official religion, and made Arabic the predominant literary language in Persian-speaking lands for some two centuries.
In the tenth century the Caliphate power, with headquarters in Bagdad, gradually weakened. The remoteness of Khorâsân, where Rudaki was based, provided a hospitable atmosphere for a “renaissance” of Persian literature. Persian poetry—now written in the Arabic alphabet—flourished under the patronage of the Samanid amirs, who drew literary talent to their court. Under the rule of Nasr ibn Ahmad II (r. 914-943), Rudaki distinguished himself as the brightest literary star of the Samanid court.
This book presents Rudaki as the founder of a new poetic aesthetic, which was adopted by subsequent generations of Persian poets. Rudaki is credited with being the first to write in the rubâi form; and many of the images we first encounter in Rudaki’s lines have become staples of Persian poetry.
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A Fire of Lilies
Perspectives on Literature and Politics in Modern Iran
Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak
Leiden University Press, 2019
A Fire of Lilies examines the role of Persian literature in the politics of the tumultuous period of Iranian history from 1950 to 2000, illustrating how intellectuals used poetry, plays, novels and short stories to comment on socio-political developments. It analyses how Persian intellectuals dealt with censorship, suppression, imprisonment, exile and even execution for the sake of expression of free speech. The book offers a strong empirical perspective, as Karimi-Hakkak has participated in the events he is writing about.
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The Heirs of Vijayanagara
Lennart Bes
Leiden University Press, 2021
A comparative study of courtly politics in four early modern kingdoms in South India.
When Dutch traders arrived on the Indian subcontinent in the early seventeenth century, they encountered a courtly culture they perceived to be traditional, peaceful, and static. In reality, the kings and Brahmins they met were engaged in a fresh power struggle following the recent collapse of the Vijayanagara empire. In The Heirs of Vijayanagarai, Lennart Bes marshals a wealth of untapped sources from both Indian and Dutch archives to recover the dynamic complexity of political life in early modern India. By comparing four kingdoms—Ikkeri, Tanjavur, Madurai, and Ramnand—across the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, this book offers a captivating analysis of political culture, power relations, and dynastic developments in south India.
When Dutch traders arrived on the Indian subcontinent in the early seventeenth century, they encountered a courtly culture they perceived to be traditional, peaceful, and static. In reality, the kings and Brahmins they met were engaged in a fresh power struggle following the recent collapse of the Vijayanagara empire. In The Heirs of Vijayanagarai, Lennart Bes marshals a wealth of untapped sources from both Indian and Dutch archives to recover the dynamic complexity of political life in early modern India. By comparing four kingdoms—Ikkeri, Tanjavur, Madurai, and Ramnand—across the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, this book offers a captivating analysis of political culture, power relations, and dynastic developments in south India.
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Heritage and Rights of Indigenous Peoples
Edited by Manuel May Castillo and Amy Strecker
Leiden University Press, 2017
In 2007, the United Nations adopted the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People, a landmark political recognition of indigenous rights. A decade later, this book looks at the status of those rights internationally. Written jointly by indigenous and non-indigenous scholars, the chapters feature case studies from four continents that explore the issues faced by Indigenous Peoples through three themes: land, spirituality, and self-determination.
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The Holy Drama
Persian Passion Play in Modern Iran
Mahnia A. Nematollahi Mahani
Leiden University Press, 2013
Persian passion play or ta'ziya depicts the role of the Prophet's granddaughter Zeynab during the tragic death of the third Shiite Imam Hoseyn in Karbala in 680. This book depicts how Zeynab has become a role model in modern Iranian society, especially during the Islamic Revolution and the Iran-Iraq War.
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A Hundred Years of Republican Turkey
A History in a Hundred Fragments
Alp Yenen
Leiden University Press
In Praise of Ambiguity
Erasmus, Huizinga and the Seriousness of Play
Willem Otterspeer
Leiden University Press, 2018
In Praise of Ambiguity presents a discourse about the seriousness of play. Erasmus and Huizinga are its main subjects, their books In Praise of Folly (1511) and Homo Ludens (1938) its main texts. Though published more than four hundred years apart, Otterspeer treats those books as contemporaries and asks what they still have to say to us. The main theme of both books is the contrast between two attitudes of life: the conviction that each subject has two or more sides as opposed to the certainty that there is always only one side to the subject. It is relativism versus essentialism, play versus seriousness.
In these times of populism and fundamentalism, the relationship between play and seriousness is more significant than ever. Erasmus and Huizinga conceive a compromise as brilliant as it is paradoxical: turn seriousness into play, play into seriousness. Their solution is the life blood of literature. Literature is always paradoxical, always "true" and "not true' at the same time, both reality and fiction. Ambiguity is its home territory. Literature is the best answer to the purity and peremptoriness of prophets.
[more]
Inescapable Entrapments?
The Civil-Military Decision Paths to Uruzgan and Helmand
Mirjam Grandia Mantas
Leiden University Press, 2021
New insights into how contemporary civilian and military leaders make decisions.
Inescapable Entrapments? reevaluates the role of the military in foreign policy by comparing the decision-making processes behind British and Dutch military action in Afghanistan. Drawing on more than one hundred interviews, this study finds that neither the military nor the government influenced the other to act; rather, the decision to deploy troops to Afghanistan emerged organically from a series of prior transnational commitments.
Inescapable Entrapments? reevaluates the role of the military in foreign policy by comparing the decision-making processes behind British and Dutch military action in Afghanistan. Drawing on more than one hundred interviews, this study finds that neither the military nor the government influenced the other to act; rather, the decision to deploy troops to Afghanistan emerged organically from a series of prior transnational commitments.
[more]
The Invasion of the Dutch East Indies
Edited and Translated by Willem Remmelink
Leiden University Press, 2015
Between 1966 and 1980, the War History Office of the National Defense College of Japan published a 102-volume military history of Imperial Japan’s involvement in the Pacific War. This book, the first full and unabridged translation of a volume from the series, describes in great detail the operation to capture the Dutch East Indies, which at the time was the largest transoceanic landing operation ever attempted.
[more]
The Invasion of the South
Army Air Force Operations, and the Invasion of Northern and Central Sumatra
Edited and Translated by Willem Remmelink
Leiden University Press, 2021
A comprehensive study of Japanese army air force operations in Indonesia during World War II.
This translation of a volume of the Senshi Sosho, the National Defense College of Japan’s unparalleled 1966–80 war history series, The Invasion of the South describes Japanese army air force operations against the Dutch East Indies during World War II. This essential resource provides the most comprehensive treatment of Japanese activity in the Indonesian archipelago, one of the largest transoceanic operations in history.
This translation of a volume of the Senshi Sosho, the National Defense College of Japan’s unparalleled 1966–80 war history series, The Invasion of the South describes Japanese army air force operations against the Dutch East Indies during World War II. This essential resource provides the most comprehensive treatment of Japanese activity in the Indonesian archipelago, one of the largest transoceanic operations in history.
[more]
Irreverent Persia
Invective, Satirical and Burlesque Poetry from the Origins to the Timurid Period (10th to 15th Century)
Edited by Riccardo Zipoli
Leiden University Press, 2015
Poetry that uses satire, invective, and burlesque to criticize social, political, and cultural life has been a vital part of Persian literature for centuries. This anthology brings together some of the most impressive, important, and, crucially, irreverent poetry from major and minor poets from the earliest days of Persian poetry through the death of Jami in 1492, the moment when the classical era of Persian poetry ended.
[more]
Ishikawa Sanshir.’s Geographical Imagination
Transnational Anarchism and the Reconfiguration of Everyday Life in Early Twentieth-Century Japan
Nadine Willems
Leiden University Press, 2020
Antiestablishment ideas in contemporary Japan are tied closely to its recent history of capitalist development and industrialization. Activist Ishikawa Sanshiro exemplifies this idea, by merging European and Japanese thought throughout the early twentieth century. Ishikawa Sanshiro’s Geographical Imagination investigates the emergence of a strand of nonviolent anarchism and uses it to reassess the role of geographic thought in modern Japan as both a tool for political dissent and a basis for dialogue between radical thinkers and activists from the East and West. By tracing Ishikawa’s travels, intellectual interests, and real-life encounters, Nadine Willems identifies a transnational “geographical imagination” that valued ethics of cooperation in the social sphere and explored the interactions between man and nature. Additionally, this work explores anarchist activism and the role played by the practices of everyday life as a powerful force of sociopolitical change.
[more]
Islam, Humanity and the Indonesian Identity
Reflections on History
Ahmad Syafii Maarif
Leiden University Press, 2018
Islam exists in global history with its richly variegated cultural and social realities. When these specific cultural contexts are marginalized, Islam is reduced to an ahistorical religion without the ability to contribute to humanity. This limited understanding of Islam has been a contributing factor in many of the violent conflicts in the present day. Reflecting on Islam in Indonesia, the world’s third largest democracy, supporting the largest Muslim population, Ahmad Syafii Maarif argues for an understanding that is both faithful to Islam’s essential teachings and open to constantly changing social and cultural contexts. Building on this, he then addresses critical contemporary issues such as democracy, human rights, religious freedom, the status of women, and the future of Islam. Syafii Maarif’s insights offer inspiration to Muslims and non-Muslims alike.
[more]
Islam, Politics and Change
The Indonesian Experience after the Fall of Suharto
Edited by Kees van Dijk and Nico J. G. Kaptein
Leiden University Press, 2015
The decades-long rule of President Suharto in Indonesia was ended by violent protests throughout the country in the spring of 1998. Following Suharto’s resignation, Indonesia successfully made the transition from an authoritarian state to a democracy, and this book explores the effects of that transformation on Islamic political organizations in Indonesia, which, for the first time in forty years, were legally allowed to campaign and promote their agenda. The contributors to this book consider the effects of these changes on the influence of orthodoxy and radicalism in Indonesian life and politics, the status of women, and the fate of religious minorities.
[more]
Jihad and Islam in World War I
Studies on the Ottoman Jihad on the Centenary of Snouck Hurgronje's "Holy War Made in Germany"
Edited by Erik-Jan Zürcher
Leiden University Press, 2015
Today’s headlines are full of references to jihad and jihadists, but they’re nothing new: a century ago, the entry of the Ottoman Empire into World War I was accompanied by a loud proclamation of jihad as well. This book resurrects that largely forgotten aspect of the war, investigating the background and nature of the proclamation, as well as its effects in the wider Middle East, the fears it stoked among German and British military leaders, and the accompanying academic debates about holy war and Islam.
[more]
Lawmaking in Dutch Sri Lanka
Navigating Pluralities in a Colonial Society
Nadeera Rupesinghe
Leiden University Press, 2023
Lived experiences of the law in colonial Sri Lanka.
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.
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.
[more]
The League Against Imperialism
Lives and Afterlives
Edited by Michele Louro, Carolien Stolte, Heather Streets-Salter, and Sana Tannoury-Karam
Leiden University Press, 2020
The League against Imperialism: Lives and Afterlives explores the dramatic and engaging story of a global institution that brought together activists across geographical and political borders for the goal of eradicating colonial rule worldwide. The League against Imperialism attracted anticolonial activists like India’s Jawaharlal Nehru, Indonesia’s Sukarno, and Kenya’s Jomo Kenyatta, as well as prominent figures like Albert Einstein, Ernst Toller, Romain Rolland, Upton Sinclair, Mohandas Gandhi, and Madame Sun Yat-Sen. This volume is the first to capture the global history of the LAI by bringing together contributions by scholars researching the movement from various regions, languages, and archives. Told primarily from the perspectives of those on the peripheries of empires, the volume argues that interwar anti-imperialism was central to the story of transnational activism during the interwar years and remained an inspiration for many who took on leadership roles during decolonization across the global south.
[more]
Lightning in the Age of Benjamin Franklin
Facts and Fictions in Science, Religion, and Art
Jan Wim Buisman
Leiden University Press, 2023
Thunder and lightning have been seen from time immemorial as God’s instruments of punishment. Until the invention of the lightning rod by Benjamin Franklin in 1752. In Lightning in the Age of Benjamin Franklin. Facts and Fictions in Science, Religion, and Art Jan Wim Buisman shows how the Enlightenment and Romanticism have changed our scientific, religious and artistic image of natural violence forever. In the eighteenth century, thunderstorms are experienced less and less as a threat and more and more as something extraordinary. The image of God and the image of nature changed radically. The religion of enlightened people, for example, was more determined by joy than by fear. And nature was almost experienced as a girlfriend. That had significant consequences because those who no longer had to be afraid of the thunderstorm could play with it without hesitation. That’s what poets, painters and musicians did to their heart’s content. Never before the beauty of the storm was depicted as much in the western culture as during the transition from the Enlightenment to Romanticism.
[more]
Liquid Footprints
Water Urbanism, and Sustainability in Roman Ostia
Mark Locicero
Leiden University Press, 2019
Liquid Footprints examines the archaeological evidence from three city blocks in Ostia, focusing on elements of the water systems identified by past excavations and within unpublished archival material. Inspired by the diversity of research approaches currently used to assess the sustainability of water in contemporary cities, this study developed the Roman Water Footprint, which diachronically assesses changes to all parts of a hydraulic system (supply, usage, drainage). At the same time, the Roman Water Footprint calculates socio-cultural expressions of water usage, and uses paleo-environmental data to highlight the dynamic natural presence of water. The use of the Roman Water Footprint offers a new look at the wider context of ancient water systems and how they changed over time. This study opens a dialogue between first and twenty first century successes and failures in our urban relationship with water.
[more]
Losing Our Minds, Coming to Our Senses
Sensory Readings of Persian Literature and Culture
Edited by M. Mehdi Khorrami and Amir Moosavi
Leiden University Press, 2021
Diverse approaches to sensoria in Persian literature.
We experience art with our whole bodies, yet traditional approaches to Persian literature overemphasize the mind—the political, allegorical, or didactic—and ignore the feelings that uniquely characterize aesthetics. Losing Our Minds, Coming to Our Senses rediscovers the sensuality of Persian art across period, genre, and artist. Through readings of such well-known writers as Rumi and lesser-known artists as Hossein Abkenar, the authors demonstrate the significance of sensoria to the rich history of Persian letters.
We experience art with our whole bodies, yet traditional approaches to Persian literature overemphasize the mind—the political, allegorical, or didactic—and ignore the feelings that uniquely characterize aesthetics. Losing Our Minds, Coming to Our Senses rediscovers the sensuality of Persian art across period, genre, and artist. Through readings of such well-known writers as Rumi and lesser-known artists as Hossein Abkenar, the authors demonstrate the significance of sensoria to the rich history of Persian letters.
[more]
The Management of the Matobo Hills in Zimbabwe
Perceptions of the Indigenous Communities on Their Involvement and Use of Traditional Conservation Practices
Simon Makuvaza
Leiden University Press, 2017
Since 1992, when the World Heritage Committee established its category of “cultural landscapes,” scholarly debates have ensued as to how they could best be managed. One approach, which appears to have gained significance over the past two decades, considers using traditional conservation practices in addition to engaging local indigenous communities in the stewardship of these exemplary sites. Based on the perspectives of the indigenous people of the Matobo Hills, this investigation studies the extent to which both traditional conservation practices and local involvement can be germane to the administration of World Heritage Cultural Landscapes.
[more]
The Mesoamerican Codex Re-entangled
Production, Use and Re-use of Pre-colonial Documents
Ludo Snijders
Leiden University Press, 2017
This innovative work aims to piece together the cultural biography of Mesoamerica’s precolonial codices. Today, fewer than twenty manuscripts are all that remain of the Mesoamerican book-making tradition. These pictographic and hieroglyphic texts have often been researched according to their content, but such studies have ignored their nature as material objects. By tracing the paths these books have followed over the past five hundred years, Ludo Snijders offers fascinating insights into their production, use and reuse, destruction, rediscovery, and reinvention.
[more]
Middle High German Legends in English Translation
Edited by Jef Jacobs, Kenny Louwen, Bart Veldhoen, and Barend Verkerk
Leiden University Press, 2022
Five medieval German legends, freshly translated with accessible reading guides.
This volume collects five medieval German legends—the story of Veronica, Vespasian, Theophilus, Mary Magdalene, and the True Cross—in both the Middle High German original and modern English translation alongside unique guides to the relevant Germanic research and the principal themes of each text.
This volume collects five medieval German legends—the story of Veronica, Vespasian, Theophilus, Mary Magdalene, and the True Cross—in both the Middle High German original and modern English translation alongside unique guides to the relevant Germanic research and the principal themes of each text.
[more]
Mirrors of Entrapment and Emancipation
Forugh Farrokhzad and Sylvia Plath
Leila Rahimi Bahmany
Leiden University Press, 2015
Images of mirrors and reflection have long played a substantial role in literature by women, used to convey ineffable psychological states, the countless images that define and complicate women’s lives, and much more. In Mirrors of Entrapment and Emancipation, Leila Rahimi Bahmany focuses in particular on the work of two major women writers, Persian poet Forugh Farrokhzad (1935–67) and the American Sylvia Plath (1932–63), exploring the various ways that these two artists deployed mirrors and reflections as sites of entrapment or emancipation.
[more]
Monsoon Asia
A reader on South and Southeast Asia
David Henley
Leiden University Press, 2023
Monsoon Asia was the first venue of global trade, a zone of encounters, exchanges, and cultural diffusion. This book demonstrates the continuing fertility of the Monsoon Asia perspective as an aid to understanding what South/Southeast Asia, as a connected space, has been in the past and is today. Sixteen tightly knit chapters, written by experts from perspectives ranging from Indology and philology to postcolonial and transnational studies, offer a captivating view of the region, with its rich and variegated history shaped by commonalities in human ecology, cultural forms, and religious practices. The contributions draw upon extensive research and a thorough command of the most recent scholarship. This volume will be an invaluable text for anyone interested in South and Southeast Asia, and for more specialized students in the fields of global and Indian Ocean history, transcultural studies, archaeology, linguistics, and politics.
[more]
The Operations of the Navy in the Dutch East Indies and the Bay of Bengal
Edited by Willem Remmelink
Leiden University Press, 2018
Between 1966 and 1980, the War History Office of the National Defense College of Japan (now the Center for Military History of the National Institute for Defense Studies) published the 102-volume Senshi Sōsho (War History Series). These volumes give a detailed account of the operations of the Imperial Japanese Army and Imperial Japanese Navy during the Second World War.
The present volume, The Operations of the Navy in the Dutch East Indies and the Bay of Bengal, volume 26 of the series, describes the Japanese Navy’s role in the campaign to gain control over the Indonesian archipelago—at that time the largest transoceanic landing operation in the military history of the world. It includes, among others, the first complete Japanese analysis of the Battle of the Java Sea, a much-debated battle that ended disastrously for the Allies and opened the way to Java for the Japanese.
The present volume, The Operations of the Navy in the Dutch East Indies and the Bay of Bengal, volume 26 of the series, describes the Japanese Navy’s role in the campaign to gain control over the Indonesian archipelago—at that time the largest transoceanic landing operation in the military history of the world. It includes, among others, the first complete Japanese analysis of the Battle of the Java Sea, a much-debated battle that ended disastrously for the Allies and opened the way to Java for the Japanese.
[more]
Parvin Etesami in the Literary and Religious Context of Twentieth-Century Iran
A Female Poet’s Challenge to Patriarchy
Zhinia Noorian
Leiden University Press
Pearls of Meaning
Studies on Persian Art, Poetry, ..f.sm and History of Iranian Studies in Europe.J.T.P. de Bruijn
J.T. P. de Bruijn
Leiden University Press, 2020
Pearls of Meanings offers a collection of essays by J. T. P. (Hans) de Bruijn, a pivotal and leading scholar of Persian studies. The volume covers a number of essential domains of Persian culture, with a particular emphasis on poetry and Sufism. Poetry and the reception of Persian literature in Europe both play pivotal roles in these essays, thereby representing the studies of a generation of Persian cultural scholars such as A. Reland (1676–1718), C. H. Ethé (1844–1917), J. F. von Hammer-Purgstall (1774–1856), and E. G. Browne (1862–1926). Pearls of Meanings is an essential cornerstone for scholars working in Persian studies.
[more]
The Persian Whitman
Beyond a Literary Reception
Behnam M. Fomeshi
Leiden University Press, 2019
Walt Whitman, a world-renowned poet and the father of American free verse, is read by diverse audiences around the world. Literary and cultural scholars have studied Whitman’s interaction with and influence in social, political, and literary movements of different countries. Despite his work’s continuing presence in Iran, Whitman’s reception in this country has remained unexplored, and, particularly due to contemporary political circumstances, Iranian reception of Western literature is a field still under-researched. The Persian Whitman examines Whitman’s reception in Iran and explores a new phenomenon born in dialogue between the Persian culture and the American poet.
[more]
Philippine Confluence
Iberian, Chinese and Islamic Currents, C. 1500-1800
Edited by Jos Gommans and Ariel Lopez
Leiden University Press, 2020
Situated at the crossroads of the Indian and Pacific Oceans, the Spanish Philippines offer historians an intriguing middle ground of connected histories that raises fundamental new questions about conventional ethnic, regional and religious identities. This volume adds a new global perspective to the history of the Philippines by juxtaposing Iberian, Chinese and Islamic perspectives. By navigating various underexplored archival resources, senior and junior scholars from Asia, Europe and the Americas explore the diverse cultural, religious, and economic flows that shaped the early modern Philippine milieu. By zooming in from the global to the local, this book offers eleven fascinating Philippine case studies of early modern globalization.
[more]
A Pictographic Naxi Origin Myth from Southwest China
An Annotated Translation
Duncan Poupard
Leiden University Press
A Place of Placelessness
Hekeng People's Heritage
Renyu Wang
Leiden University Press, 2017
Tulou, the traditional fortified multifamily dwellings prevalent in southern Fujian, China, are the focus of this three-pronged biography of environments in the Hekeng River Valley. This book explores every aspect of the historical settlement environments surrounding a tulou, incorporating oral histories and interviews to create a complete picture of the cultural, architectural, agricultural, and economic influences that build up these lineage societies. Highlighted also are the tensions between political systems and families in keeping these heritage sites alive.
[more]
Place
Towards a Geophilosophy of Photography
Ali Shobeiri
Leiden University Press, 2021
A new theoretical perspective on place in photography.
Drawing on theoretical insights from geography and philosophy, Ali Shobeiri examines how six fundamentals of photography—the photographer, camera, photograph, image, spectator, and genre—manifest unique, contingent notions of “place.” The geophilosophy that emerges offers a new language for understanding how “place” encapsulates everything that invites and resists location, identity, story, function, and meaning.
Drawing on theoretical insights from geography and philosophy, Ali Shobeiri examines how six fundamentals of photography—the photographer, camera, photograph, image, spectator, and genre—manifest unique, contingent notions of “place.” The geophilosophy that emerges offers a new language for understanding how “place” encapsulates everything that invites and resists location, identity, story, function, and meaning.
[more]
The Potters’ Perspectives
A Vibrant Chronological Narrative of Ceramic Manufacturing Practices in the Valley of Juigalpa, Chontales, Nicaragua (cal 300 CE–present)
Natalia R. Donner
Leiden University Press, 2020
The work of Fernand Braudel (1902–1985) should have revolutionized the way the field of archaeology thinks about the passage of time and constructs narratives throughout it. Braudel’s more general theories deeply affected archaeological theory, yet his three different timescales, as well as his insights into duration as the inner dialectic between different temporalities, remain largely unexplored by practicing archaeologists. Even today, ceramic chronology-building in archaeology still relies on two main variables: time-space and pottery styles. This book seeks to upset that paradigm, proposing instead a radical new approach to creating chronology. This endeavor begins in the valley of Juigalpa, in central Nicaragua, using materials—especially ceramics—as complex palimpsests, through which a chronology that includes five different intervals based on ceramic technologies is presented, from the first traces of human practices in 300 CE through to the present.
[more]
Principles for Progress
Essays on Religion and Modernity by `Abdu'l-Bahá
Translated and with an Introduction by Sen McGlinn
Leiden University Press, 2018
This book presents three of the works of Abduʾl-Bahā, son of the founder of the Bahāʾi Faith, which deal with social and political issues.
In The Secret of Divine Civilization (1875) Abduʾl-Bahā supports the administrative and broader social reforms of Mirzā Hosayn Khān, but looks mainly for organic reform through the efforts of Iranian intellectuals to awaken and educate the masses. In this work, Abduʾl-Bahā gives virtuous and progressive Islamic clerics a leading role among these intellectuals—indeed most of his appeals are directed specifically to them. A Traveller’s Narrative (1889/90) is an authoritative statement of the overarching concepts of Bahā’i social and political thinking. The Art of Governance (1892/93) was written as Iran entered a prerevolutionary phase, and ideas that we recognize today as the precursors of political Islam were spreading. It sets out the principles underlying the ideal relationship between religion and politics and between the government and the people.
In addition to presenting the first parallel text translations of these works, the Persian texts incorporate notes on variants in the early published sources. An introduction outlines the intellectual and political landscape from which Abduʾl-Bahā wrote, and in which his readers lived.
[more]
Proportional Systems in the History of Architecture
A Critical Consideration
Edited by Matthew A. Cohen and Maarten Delbeke
Leiden University Press, 2019
Prior to the advent of modern structural engineering, architects and builders used proportional systems to imbue their works with a general condition of order that was integral to notions of beauty and structural stability. These mostly invisible intellectual frameworks ranged from simple grids and symbolic numbers, to sly manipulations of geometry and numbers that required privileged knowledge and arithmetical calculations to access. Since the origins of architectural history, proportional systems have served as objects of belief and modes of iconographical communication. Whether they are capable of fulfilling more tangible functions remains a matter of debate today, but as the contributors to this volume show, these ancient and diverse belief systems continue to infiltrate architectural thinking in subtle and sometimes surprising ways today.
[more]
Real Legal Certainty and its Relevance
Essays in honor of Jan Michiel Otto
Edited by Adriaan Bedner and Barbara Oomen
Leiden University Press, 2018
The concept of “real legal certainty” provides a much-needed corrective to the general attention legal certainty currently receives, emphasizing relations between citizens, adding socio-legal insight, and providing a “view from below” Real legal certainty thus leads to more realistic insights on how to build state institutions. The concept was introduced by Leiden University’s professor of law and governance in developing countries Jan Michiel Otto, and can be considered a central pillar of his work.
In this volume, friends and colleagues of Otto engage with the concept of real legal certainty against the backdrop of an ever-increasing interest in legal certainty in policy-making and academia, providing a wide variety of examples of its relevance. Drawing on case material from all over the world, they show how real legal certainty can be understood in a bottom-up manner and how it is relevant for building state institutions. They also show how the concept can gain in relevance by taking non-state actors into account. In all, the volume is important reading for all whom share Otto’s interest in translating law in the books and into law in action.
In this volume, friends and colleagues of Otto engage with the concept of real legal certainty against the backdrop of an ever-increasing interest in legal certainty in policy-making and academia, providing a wide variety of examples of its relevance. Drawing on case material from all over the world, they show how real legal certainty can be understood in a bottom-up manner and how it is relevant for building state institutions. They also show how the concept can gain in relevance by taking non-state actors into account. In all, the volume is important reading for all whom share Otto’s interest in translating law in the books and into law in action.
[more]
Reconstructing the Settled Landscape of the Cyclades
The Islands of Paros and Naxos During the Late Antique and Early Byzantine Centuries
Konstantinos Z. Roussos
Leiden University Press, 2018
The aim of this book is to offer a fresh approach to the history and archaeology of the Cyclades in Late Antiquity and the Byzantine Early Middle Ages in light of current archaeological investigations. It is an attempt to interpret human-environmental interaction in order to read the relationship between islands, settlements, landscapes, and seascapes in the context of the diverse and highly interactive Mediterranean world.
It offers an interdisciplinary approach, which combines archaeological evidence, literary sources, and observations of the sites and microlandscapes as a whole, using the advantages offered by the application of new technologies in archaeological research (Geographic Information Systems). The islands of Paros and Naxos are used as case-studies. The author traces how these neighboring insular communities reacted under the same general circumstances pertaining in the Aegean and to what extent the landscape played a role in this process.
[more]
The Rise of the Ni‘matull.h. Order
Shi'ite Sufi Masters against Islamic Fundamentalism in 19th-Century Persia
Reza Tabandeh
Leiden University Press, 2021
Sufi mysticism’s surprising revival in nineteenth-century Shi‘ite Persia.
Islamic mysticism experienced a remarkable revival in nineteenth-century fundamentalist Persia. Sparked by the return of the Sufi master Ma‘um Ali Shah from India, the Ni‘matullāhī Order rapidly spread throughout the region amid fierce opposition from Shi‘te clerics. Rise of the Ni‘matullāhī Order charts the movement’s unlikely rise across three generations of Sufi masters. Reza Tabandeh demonstrates how Ma‘um Ali Shah, Majdhub Ali Shah, and Mast Ali Shah sustained the revival by reinterpreting classical Sufi teachings for a Shi‘ite context.
Islamic mysticism experienced a remarkable revival in nineteenth-century fundamentalist Persia. Sparked by the return of the Sufi master Ma‘um Ali Shah from India, the Ni‘matullāhī Order rapidly spread throughout the region amid fierce opposition from Shi‘te clerics. Rise of the Ni‘matullāhī Order charts the movement’s unlikely rise across three generations of Sufi masters. Reza Tabandeh demonstrates how Ma‘um Ali Shah, Majdhub Ali Shah, and Mast Ali Shah sustained the revival by reinterpreting classical Sufi teachings for a Shi‘ite context.
[more]
The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám
An Updated Bibliography
Jos Coumans
Leiden University Press, 2010
Since the collected poems of eleventh- and twelfth-century Persian philosopher Omar Khayyám were first translated into English in 1859 by Patrick Fitzgerald, the Rubáiyát has become one of the most popular books of verse in the world. In addition to English, it has been translated into Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Hebrew, Hindi, Russian, Urdu, and many other languages. It has been published in numerous editions: precious volumes with bejeweled bindings, artist’s books, scholarly and critical editions, forgeries and fake editions, making it a perfect object for both book collectors and lovers of poetry. This comprehensive volume is the first bibliography of Khayyám’s classic work since the first Rubáiyát bibliography by A. G. Potter, which was published in 1929
[more]
Serving the chain?
De Nederlandsche Bank and the last decades of slavery, 1814-1863
Karwan Fatah-Black
Leiden University Press
Sharia Incorporated
A Comparative Overview of the Legal Systems of Twelve Muslim Countries in Past and Present
Edited by Jan Michiel Otto
Leiden University Press, 2010
The aim of Sharia Incorporated is to provide unbiased and contextual information about a topic that has of late been hijacked by politics in the Muslim world as well as in the West. Sharia Incorporated, written by laudable international scholars, is an ambitious study of the incorporation of Islamic law traditions into national legal systems. The book also explores the sensitive topic of ‘Western’ human rights and other rule of law standards in a Muslim world. It provides an in-depth analysis of the role of sharia in the historical and legal formation of twelve representative Muslim states, with a unique comparison of key issues raised by the ‘Islamic awakening’ of recent decades. In the preface Jan Michiel Otto goes to the heart of the prevailing environment in which Western discourses tend to oversimplify the substance and effect of Islam and sharia.
[more]
South Asia Unbound
New International Histories of the Subcontinent
Bérénice Guyot-Réchard
Leiden University Press, 2023
Whose international matters, and why? How are geographic regions constructed? What are the channels of engagement between a place, its people, its institutions, and the world? How do we understand the non-West’s influence in contemporary global interactions? From humanitarianism and activism to diplomacy and institutional networks, South Asia has been a crucial place for the elaboration of international politics, even before the twentieth century. South Asia Unbound gathers an interdisciplinary group of scholars from across the world to investigate South Asian global engagement at the local, regional, national, and supra-national levels, spanning the time before and after independence. Only by understanding its past entanglements with the world can we understand South Asia’s increasing global importance today.
[more]
Spatial Patterns in Landscape Archaeology
A GIS Procedure to Study Settlement Organization in Early Roman Colonial Territories
Anita Casarotto
Leiden University Press, 2018
This 43rd volume of the ASLU series presents a useful GIS procedure to study settlement patterns in landscape archaeology. In several Mediterranean regions, archaeological sites have been mapped by fieldwalking surveys, producing large amounts of data. These legacy site-based survey data represent an important resource to study ancient settlement organization. Methodological procedures are necessary to cope with the limits of these data, and more importantly with the distortions on data patterns caused by biasing factors.
This book develops and applies a GIS procedure to use legacy survey data in settlement pattern analysis. It consists of two parts. One part regards the assessment of biases that can affect the spatial patterns exhibited by survey data. The other part aims to shed light on the location preferences and settlement strategy of ancient communities underlying site patterns. In this book, a case-study shows how the method works in practice. As part of the research by the Landscapes of Early Roman Colonization project (NWO, Leiden University, KNIR) site-based datasets produced by survey projects in central-southern Italy are examined in a comparative framework to investigate settlement patterns in the early Roman colonial period (3rd century B.C.).
This book develops and applies a GIS procedure to use legacy survey data in settlement pattern analysis. It consists of two parts. One part regards the assessment of biases that can affect the spatial patterns exhibited by survey data. The other part aims to shed light on the location preferences and settlement strategy of ancient communities underlying site patterns. In this book, a case-study shows how the method works in practice. As part of the research by the Landscapes of Early Roman Colonization project (NWO, Leiden University, KNIR) site-based datasets produced by survey projects in central-southern Italy are examined in a comparative framework to investigate settlement patterns in the early Roman colonial period (3rd century B.C.).
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Staging Asia
The Dutch East India Company and the Amsterdam Theatre
Manjusha Kuruppath
Leiden University Press, 2016
In the early modern Dutch Republic, three playwrights wrote dramas based on political revolutions that were occurring at that same time in Asia. Reflecting on this remarkable phenomenon, Staging Asia traces the transmission of the stories surrounding the seventeenth-century Asian events and their ultimate appearance in Europe as Dutch dramas. Manjusha Kuruppath explores the nature of the representation of the Orient in these works and evaluates how this characterization was influenced by the channels, including some connected to the Dutch East India Company, that the dramatists relied on to gather information for their plays.
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Staging China
The Politics of Mass Spectacle
Florian Schneider
Leiden University Press, 2019
The People’s Republic of China began the 21st century with a new-and-improved public relations approach that was meant to counter anxieties about China’s role in the world while simultaneously showcasing its leadership’s policies to a domestic audience. Crucial to this communication strategy have been networked spectacles: elaborate mass events, designed to reconfigure organizations, ideas, and relations between people. In Staging China, Florian Schneider analyzes large-scale projects like the Beijing Olympics and the Shanghai Expo to show how such spectacles became part of the ruling party’s governance toolkit under Hu Jintao’s leadershi, and how their legacy informs politics and political communication in China to this day.
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Star Authors in the Age of Romanticism
Literary Celebrity in the Netherlands
Rick Honings
Leiden University Press, 2018
Although we have always been fascinated with famous people, the invention of modern celebrity culture dates to the nineteenth century. During Romanticism, literary authors occupied a prominent position among early stars. These changes not only had implications for the cultural role of the author, but also that of the public. A star exists by virtue of its audience, and as authors became public figures, the phenomenon of the fan and associated culture of fandom came into existence.
Star Authors in the Age of Romanticism analyzes Dutch literary celebrity culture specifically while also examining its unique place in a growing body of international scholarship on the subject. This book examines the Dutch development of literary celebrity by focusing on five famous Dutch authors from the nineteenth century: Willem Bilderdijk, Hendrik Tollens, Nicolaas Beets, François HaverSchmidt (alias Piet Paaltjens), and Eduard Douwes Dekker (better known as Multatuli).
Star Authors in the Age of Romanticism analyzes Dutch literary celebrity culture specifically while also examining its unique place in a growing body of international scholarship on the subject. This book examines the Dutch development of literary celebrity by focusing on five famous Dutch authors from the nineteenth century: Willem Bilderdijk, Hendrik Tollens, Nicolaas Beets, François HaverSchmidt (alias Piet Paaltjens), and Eduard Douwes Dekker (better known as Multatuli).
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A Story of Conquest and Adventure
The Large Faramarzname
Translated and with an Introduction by Marjolijn van Zutphen
Leiden University Press, 2017
A Story of Conquest and Adventure: The Large Farāmarznāme presents a poem from the Persian epic cycle dated to the late eleventh century in an English prose translation for the first time. The story tells how Farāmarz, a son of the famous Shāhnāme hero Rostam, conquers several provinces of India, before setting off on an extensive voyage over sea and land, leading his troops through a number of hazardous situations in various fictional countries. Finding love and battling men, demons, and various ferocious animals, the epic hero comes to life in this riveting translation.
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Terrorism and Counterterrorism Studies
Comparing Theory and Practice
Edwin Bakker
Leiden University Press, 2015
One of the defining issues of our age, terrorism frequently makes headlines as governments, private businesses, and ordinary citizens find themselves at risk or under attack. But what is the nature of this threat, and what can be done about it?
Terrorism and Counterterrorism Studies examines the essence of terrorism as an instrument to achieve certain goals and explores our difficulties in defining the very concept itself. The volume also provides an overview of current (counter)terrorism studies and discusses policy implications. The resulting recommendations will be valuable for limiting terrorism’s impact and reducing the threat to global peace, security, and stability.
Terrorism and Counterterrorism Studies examines the essence of terrorism as an instrument to achieve certain goals and explores our difficulties in defining the very concept itself. The volume also provides an overview of current (counter)terrorism studies and discusses policy implications. The resulting recommendations will be valuable for limiting terrorism’s impact and reducing the threat to global peace, security, and stability.
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Terrorism and Counterterrorism Studies
Comparing Theory and Practice. 2nd Revised Edition
Edwin Bakker
Leiden University Press, 2022
Terrorism has been one of the most important threats to peace, security and stability in many parts of the world. But what does this mean? What is the nature of this threat? What can be done about it and how can we at least limit the impact of terrorism?
These are just a handful of questions that will be addressed in this book that consists of four parts. First it focuses on the essence of terrorism as an instrument to achieve certain goals and the difficulties in defining the term. The second part provides an overview of the state of the art of terrorism studies. The most interesting results of this academic field are examined and compared with empirical evidence with the aim to either stress their importance or to debunk them as myths. The final part looks into the impact of terrorism, recent developments and their implications for both academics and policymakers.
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Terrorists on Trial
A Performative Perspective
Edited by Beatrice de Graaf and Alex P. Schmid
Leiden University Press, 2015
Terrorists on Trial offers an unexpected—and productive—new perspective on terrorism trials, viewing them as a form of theater, in which the “show” that a trial offers can develop its own unexpected dynamics, aspects that occasionally inconvenience the prosecuting government and interfere with its aims. As a political construct, the crime of terrorism is an essentially contested act, and interpreting trials through this lens enables us to see their performative aspects more clearly than ever. With close analyses of trials in the United States, Spain, Russia, Germany, and the Netherlands, Terrorists on Trial breaks new ground for our understanding of a crucial contemporary problem.
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Time, History and Ritual in a K'iche' Community
Contemporary Maya Calendar Knowledge and Practices in the Highlands of Guatemala
Paul van den Akker
Leiden University Press, 2018
This work analyzes ritual practices and knowledge related to the Mesoamerican calendar with the aim of contributing to an understanding of the use and conceptualization of this calendar system in the contemporary K’iche’ community of Momostenango in the Highlands of Guatemala. The research presented here discusses the indigenous calendar system, forms of synergy between the Christian and the Highland Guatemalan calendar, the indigenous perception of history, and continuity in time-related symbolism.
Van den Akker argues that the social role of cultural anthropologists and archaeologists is to contribute to the ongoing process of cultural healing and spiritual recovery of the peoples that suffer(ed) from colonization and oppression. This study therefore places an emphasis on cultural continuity and approaches the continuation of Maya calendar practices as a possible tool for restoring breaks in social memory, which are caused by dramatic events such as colonization.
Throughout this book it is argued that time is an authority which directs human behavior in a cyclical manner through the landscape on a local and regional scale. Time is related to morality and cultural values, and a shared perception of time contributes to the cohesion of the community as it recreates and reaffirms the identity of its members by reiterating their shared social conventions and history. Finally, the conjunction of time and ritual provides a tool to overcome the rupture caused by death and to transmit messages from generation to generation over a long span of time.
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Tourism and the Emergence of Nation-States in the Arab Eastern Mediterranean, 1920s-1930s
Jasmin Daam
Leiden University Press
In the aftermath of World War I, the beaten paths of tourism guided an increasing number of international tourists to the hinterlands of the Arab Eastern Mediterranean, where they would admire pyramids and Roman ruins. Yet they were not the only visitors: Arab nationalists gathered in summer resorts, and Yishuvi skiing clubs practised on Lebanese mountain slopes. By catering to these travellers, local tour guides and advocates of tourism development pursued their agendas. The book unearths unexpected connections between tourism and the emergence of nation-states in Egypt, Palestine, Syria and Lebanon. Arab middle-class actors striving for independence, Zionist settlers and mandate officials presented their visions of the post-Ottoman spatial order to an international audience of tourists. At the same time, mobilities and infrastructures of tourism shaped the material conditions of this order. Tourism thus helps us to understand the transformations of Arab societies in their global context, and its history is a colourful story of the emergence of the modern Middle East.
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Towards a Data-driven Military
A Multidisciplinary Perspective
Peter Pijpers
Leiden University Press, 2023
Towards a Data-Driven Military: A Multidisciplinary Perspective assesses the use of data and information on modern conflict from different scientific and methodological disciplines, aiming to generate valuable contributions to the ongoing discourse on data, the military and modern warfare. Part one, ‘Military Systems and Technology’,, approaches the theme empirically by researching how data can enhance the utility of military materiel and subsequently accelerate the decision-making process. Part two, ‘War Studies’, takes a multidisciplinary approach to the evolution of warfare, while the third part, ‘Military Management Studies’, takes a holistic organisational and procedural approach. Based on their scientific protocols and research methods, the three domains put forward different research questions and perspectives, providing the unique character of this book.
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The Travels of Pieter Albert Bik
Writings from the Dutch Colonial World of the Early Nineteenth Century
Mikko Toivanen
Leiden University Press, 2017
Pieter Albert Bik (1798–1855) was a Dutch colonial official whose work took him all over the world, including travels throughout Europe, the Dutch East Indies, and Japan. This book presents for the first time in English his autobiographical writings about those travels, which Bik never published in his lifetime. Presented here with annotations to set his observations in context, Bik’s accounts offer a unique glimpse of the wide horizons of the world of Dutch colonialism in the first half of the nineteenth century, while editor Mikko Toivanen also draws interesting parallels between Bik’s travels and the contemporary emergence of tourist travel in Europe.
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Troubled Waters
Developing a New Approach to Maritime and Underwater Cultural Heritage Management in Sub-Saharan Africa
Jonathan Sharfman
Leiden University Press, 2018
This 41th volume of the ASLU series examines perspectives on maritime and underwater cultural heritage (MUCH) in southern Africa and proposes new management approaches to advance protection and public engagement. By redefining the maritime historical narratives in countries that have predominantly interpreted their maritime past through colonial shipwrecks, it is possible to create an environment in which stakeholders become active participants in heritage management. The application of a broad maritime cultural landscape perspective that blurs the lines between the natural and cultural, tangible and intangible, and local and global binaries that are often applied to MUCH, results in a community-driven, relevant approach to heritage management. Appropriate management strategies are supported by balancing western based heritage values with alternative approaches to heritage conservation. Case studies illustrate the evolution and efficacy of this approach
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Understanding Contemporary Islamic Crises in the Middle East
The Issues Beneath the Surface
Graham E. Fuller
Leiden University Press, 2016
During the past decade in the Middle East, widespread war and violence, the collapse of numerous regimes, and the emergence of ISIS have caused profound geopolitical shifts. This book addresses these changes and how they may shape the future of this tumultuous region.
First, Graham E. Fuller focuses on Shari’a law and its appropriate role, if any, in the politics and governance of the Muslim world, thereby further exploring why identity may be the most important factor in examining politics in the Middle East today. He also addresses the current Shi’ite-Sunni conflict, going beyond theological approaches found in most Western analysis to better understand the many more extra-religious factors also at work. Perhaps most importantly, this book claims that the appearance of ISIS has stretched the perennial phenomenon of political Islam to the extreme. Fuller concludes by asking what ISIS implies for the future of the Middle East and for Muslims’ understanding of Islam itself.
First, Graham E. Fuller focuses on Shari’a law and its appropriate role, if any, in the politics and governance of the Muslim world, thereby further exploring why identity may be the most important factor in examining politics in the Middle East today. He also addresses the current Shi’ite-Sunni conflict, going beyond theological approaches found in most Western analysis to better understand the many more extra-religious factors also at work. Perhaps most importantly, this book claims that the appearance of ISIS has stretched the perennial phenomenon of political Islam to the extreme. Fuller concludes by asking what ISIS implies for the future of the Middle East and for Muslims’ understanding of Islam itself.
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The United States and South Asia from the Age of Empire to Decolonization
A History of Entanglements
Harald Fischer-Tiné
Leiden University Press, 2023
The contributions assembled in this volume present cutting-edge research that examines the network of Indo-American interconnections over a wider time frame. The case studies stretch into the American republic’s early decades, hinting at a longer history of mutual influence and exchange, beyond the registers of the American century’ of globalization. By bringing together academics working across disciplines ranging from history to cultural and literary studies, comparative religion, political science and sociology, this volume thus foregrounds and historicizes the complex, multi-sited, polyvalent nature of the Indo-US encounter. At the same time, the book explores the possibilities of methodologically engaging with established categories—such as the nation, the imperial and Empire—and test alternative typologies to understand this encounter better. Taken together, our authors reconstruct the myriad ways in which Americans and Indians have engaged with each other through trade, diplomacy, intellectual comradeship, missionary evangelism and revolutionary fervor.
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Wali Pitu and Muslim Pilgrimage in Bali, Indonesia
Inventing a Sacred Tradition
Syaifudin Zuhri
Leiden University Press, 2022
This ethnographic book deals with the emergence of the Wali Pitu (seven saints) tradition and Muslim pilgrimage in Bali, Indonesia. It touches upon the issues of translocal connectivity between Java and Bali, Islam-Hindu relationship, relations between Muslim groups, and questions of authority and authenticity of saint worship tradition. It offers a new perspective on Bali, seeing the island as a site of cultural motion straddling in between Islam and Hinduism with complexities of local figurations, and belongings of ‘Muslim Balinese’. The study also urges the intricate relationship between religion and tourism, between devotion and economy, and shows that the Wali Pitu tradition has facilitated the transgression of spatial and cultural boundaries.
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Why biodiversity loss is not a disaster
Bas Haring
Leiden University Press, 2020
Philosopher Bas Haring argues that mass extinction is not a harbinger of global disaster.
Each year, climate change drives more and more species extinct, leaving many fearful for the fate of the planet. Why Biodiversity Loss is Not a Disaster calms such fears: we have no reason to believe fewer species will result in cataclysmic disaster. In this book, philosopher Bas Haring argues that nature is not like a machine that falls apart without all its parts. While some environments depend on the survival of specific species, he contends, these unique relationships cannot be generalized to the planet at large. In the long view, Haring writes, biodiversity loss is a pity but not a disaster.
Each year, climate change drives more and more species extinct, leaving many fearful for the fate of the planet. Why Biodiversity Loss is Not a Disaster calms such fears: we have no reason to believe fewer species will result in cataclysmic disaster. In this book, philosopher Bas Haring argues that nature is not like a machine that falls apart without all its parts. While some environments depend on the survival of specific species, he contends, these unique relationships cannot be generalized to the planet at large. In the long view, Haring writes, biodiversity loss is a pity but not a disaster.
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Wild West Frisia
The Role of Domestic and Wild Resource Exploitation in Bronze Age Subsistence
Yvonne F. van Amerongen
Leiden University Press, 2017
Wild West Frisia reconstructs the daily lives of Bronze Age farmers and analyzes the separate components comprising Bronze Age subsistence (i.e. crop and animal husbandry, hunting and gathering) rather innovatively. Instead of summarizing the known data for each subsistence strategy and drawing conclusions solely based on these observations, this study first determines what may have been present yet perhaps is no longer visible. In doing so, the author learns that the exploitation of wild resources was perhaps just as important as crop domestication for those living in the Bronze Age.
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World History - A Genealogy
Private Conversations with World Historians, 1996–2016
Edited by Carolien Stolte and Alicia Schrikker
Leiden University Press, 2017
World History—A Genealogy charts the history of the discipline through twenty-five in-depth conversations with historians whose work has shaped the field of world history in fundamental ways. These conversations, which took place over a period of twenty years for the world history journal Itinerario, cover these historians’ lives, work, and views of the academy in general and the field of world history in particular. An extensive introduction distills the most important developments in the field from these conversations, and sheds light on what these historians have in common, as well as—perhaps more importantly—what separates them.
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World History for International Studies
Edited by Isabelle Duyvesteyn and Anne Marieke van der Wal
Leiden University Press, 2022
Studying change in the course of human history, in different places, through the lens of a diverse set of core themes, World History for International Studies offers readers a set of windows into different debates historians have been conducting. Key themes, such as communication, trade, order, slavery, religion, war, identity, modernity, norms and ecology, are linked to specific world regions, which tell a story about how local ideas and individual contacts developed, started to overlap and became globally understood and used by ever larger groups of people. These themes are brought to life by a diverse set of key primary sources, such as a book, a letter, a medal, a temple and an epic, to showcase how historians have used sources to tell these stories and conduct debates. The book provides an introductory resource into the study of history and includes detailed suggestions for further study.
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