Throughout the fourteenth century AD/eighth century H, waves of plague swept out of Central Asia and decimated populations from China to Iceland. So devastating was the Black Death across the Old World that some historians have compared its effects to those of a nuclear holocaust. As countries began to recover from the plague during the following century, sharp contrasts arose between the East, where societies slumped into long-term economic and social decline, and the West, where technological and social innovation set the stage for Europe's dominance into the twentieth century. Why were there such opposite outcomes from the same catastrophic event?

In contrast to previous studies that have looked to differences between Islam and Christianity for the solution to the puzzle, this pioneering work proposes that a country's system of landholding primarily determined how successfully it recovered from the calamity of the Black Death. Stuart Borsch compares the specific cases of Egypt and England, countries whose economies were based in agriculture and whose pre-plague levels of total and agrarian gross domestic product were roughly equivalent. Undertaking a thorough analysis of medieval economic data, he cogently explains why Egypt's centralized and urban landholding system was unable to adapt to massive depopulation, while England's localized and rural landholding system had fully recovered by the year 1500.

Around 11,000 years ago, a Paleoindian culture known to us as "Clovis" occupied much of North America. Considered to be among the continent's earliest human inhabitants, the Clovis peoples were probably nomadic hunters and gatherers whose remaining traces include camp sites and caches of goods stored for utilitarian or ritual purposes.

This book offers the first comprehensive study of a little-known aspect of Clovis culture—stone blade technology. Michael Collins introduces the topic with a close look at the nature of blades and the techniques of their manufacture, followed by a discussion of the full spectrum of Clovis lithic technology and how blade production relates to the production of other stone tools. He then provides a full report of the discovery and examination of fourteen blades found in 1988 in the Keven Davis Cache in Navarro County, Texas.

Collins also presents a comparative study of known and presumed Clovis blades from many sites, discusses the Clovis peoples' caching practices, and considers what lithic technology and caching behavior can add to our knowledge of Clovis lifeways. These findings will be important reading for both specialists and amateurs who are piecing together the puzzle of the peopling of the Americas, since the manufacture of blades is a trait that Clovis peoples shared with the Upper Paleolithic peoples in Europe and northern Asia.

Gideon Libson's highly original work on custom is the first attempt to present a comprehensive comparative study of Jewish-Islamic law on a particular topic during the early Middle Ages. His in-depth study of Islamic law—its sources, legal schools, and extensive legal literature—together with his expertise in the wide range of geonic and rabbinic literature enable him to determine the influence of Muslim practice on geonic custom.

In both systems of law the growth of custom was a reaction to the general culture. He shows conclusively how custom in both systems of law served as a conduit for the absorption of changes, thus helping to bridge the gap between the authoritative legal systems and the practical realities of the environment. Libson's contribution to the study of comparative Jewish and Islamic law during the geonic period will be of value to scholars engaged in the study of comparative law.

Ours has been called a global "age of rights," an era in which respect for human rights is considered the highest aspiration of the international democratic community. Since the United Nation's 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a wide variety of protections—civil, political, economic, social, and cultural—have been given legal validation as countries ratify treaties, participate in intergovernmental organizations, and establish human rights tribunals and truth and reconciliation commissions.

Yet notable human rights failures have marred the post-Declaration era, including ongoing state violence toward citizens, the selectivity of humanitarian intervention (evidenced by the international community's failure to respond in Rwanda), and recent legislation in advanced democracies that trades some rights for protection against the threat of terrorism. How are we to reconcile the language of rights with the reality? Do we live in an age of rights after all?

In Protecting Human Rights, Todd Landman provides a unique quantitative analysis of the marked gap between the principle and practice of human rights. Applying theories and methods from the fields of international law, international relations, and comparative politics, Landman examines data from 193 countries over 25 years (1976-2000) to assess the growth of the international human rights regime, the effect of law on actual protection, and global variation in human rights norms.

Landman contends that human rights foreign policy remains based more on geo-strategic interest than moral internationalism. He argues that the influence human rights ideals have begun to have on states cannot be separated from the broader impact of socioeconomic changes that swept the globe in the late twentieth century. Landman concludes that international law alone will not suffice to fully protect human rights—it must be accompanied by democratic government, effective conflict resolution, and just economic systems.

This is the first full-scale comparative study of the nature of slavery. In a work of prodigious scholarship and enormous breadth, which draws on the tribal, ancient, premodern, and modern worlds, Orlando Patterson discusses the internal dynamics of slavery in sixty-six societies over time. These include Greece and Rome, medieval Europe, China, Korea, the Islamic kingdoms, Africa, the Caribbean islands, and the American South. Slavery is shown to be a parasitic relationship between master and slave, invariably entailing the violent domination of a natally alienated, or socially dead, person. The phenomenon of slavery as an institution, the author argues, is a single process of recruitment, incorporation on the margin of society, and eventual manumission or death.

Distinctions abound in this work. Beyond the reconceptualization of the basic master–slave relationship and the redefinition of slavery as an institution with universal attributes, Patterson rejects the legalistic Roman concept that places the “slave as property” at the core of the system. Rather, he emphasizes the centrality of sociological, symbolic, and ideological factors interwoven within the slavery system. Along the whole continuum of slavery, the cultural milieu is stressed, as well as political and psychological elements. Materialistic and racial factors are deemphasized. The author is thus able, for example, to deal with “elite” slaves, or even eunuchs, in the same framework of understanding as fieldhands; to uncover previously hidden principles of inheritance of slave and free status; and to show the tight relationship between slavery and freedom.

Interdisciplinary in its methods, this study employs qualitative and quantitative techniques from all the social sciences to demonstrate the universality of structures and processes in slave systems and to reveal cross-cultural variations in the slave trade and in slavery, in rates of manumission, and in the status of freedmen. Slavery and Social Death lays out a vast new corpus of research that underpins an original and provocative thesis.

Winner of the Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Award, American Sociological Association
Co-Winner of the Ralph J. Bunche Award, American Political Science Association

In a work of prodigious scholarship and enormous breadth, which draws on the tribal, ancient, premodern, and modern worlds, Orlando Patterson discusses the internal dynamics of slavery in sixty-six societies over time. These include Greece and Rome, medieval Europe, China, Korea, the Islamic kingdoms, Africa, the Caribbean islands, and the American South.

Praise for the previous edition:

“Densely packed, closely argued, and highly controversial in its dissent from much of the scholarly conventional wisdom about the function and structure of slavery worldwide.”
—Boston Globe

“There can be no doubt that this rich and learned book will reinvigorate debates that have tended to become too empirical and specialized. Patterson has helped to set out the direction for the next decades of interdisciplinary scholarship.”
—David Brion Davis, New York Review of Books

“This is clearly a major and important work, one which will be widely discussed, cited, and used. I anticipate that it will be considered among the landmarks in the study of slavery, and will be read by historians, sociologists, and anthropologists—as well as many other scholars and students.”
—Stanley Engerman

Why did the Vietnamese accept certain Chinese institutions and yet explicitly reject others? How did Vietnamese cultural borrowings from China alter the dynamics of traditional relations between Vietnam, Siam, Laos, and Cambodia? How did Vietnam's smaller Southeast Asian environment modify and distort classical East Asian institutions?

Woodside has answered these questions in this well-received political and cultural study. This first real comparison of the civil governments of two traditional East Asian societies on an institution-by-institution basis is now reissued with a new preface.

Why did the Vietnamese accept certain Chinese institutions and yet explicitly reject others? How did Vietnamese cultural borrowings from China alter the dynamics of traditional relations between Vietnam, Siam, Laos, and Cambodia? How did Vietnam’s smaller Southeast Asian environment modify and distort classical East Asian institutions?

Alexander Woodside has answered these questions in this well-received political and cultural study. This first real comparison of the civil governments of two traditional East Asian societies on an institution-by-institution basis is now reissued with a new preface.