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The Politics of Identity of the Naths (Yogis) of Bengal and Assam
Author:
The identity politics of the householder Naths (Yogis), on the one hand, is one of the oldest and most persistent identity assertions in Bengal and Assam. On the other, for an array of reasons, the identity assertion of the householder Naths of Bengal and Assam has failed to draw academic curiosity so far. Since the late nineteenth century, a segment of the Naths, largely educated and elite, has been crafting their identity as Brahman grounded on their “origin myth”, negotiating with the British colonial administration through different census enumerations, as well as internal social reforms. One of the primary reasons for their current lagging is that the Naths never politicised their identity and demands, and did not mobilise themselves in the democratic political arena.
A Critical Edition of a Seventeenth-century Volga-Turkī Source
Editor / Translator:
The Book of the Činggis Legend is a product of the steppe’s oral historiography, referring to events from the 13th−17th centuries, and presents the collective historical consciousness of the nomadic peoples of the Volga region's Turco-Tatar world.
The stories offer abundant information on the society, way of thinking and morals of the nomads, one of them can even be regarded as a kind of nomad “mirror of princes”. The other ones incorporate such crucial events in the Volga region as the islamization of nomad clans, epidemic, famine, the appearance of Halley’s Comet, the uprising of the Bashkirs, etc.
This book includes the first critical text edition of the source, the first full translation into English along with a glossary, historical comments, a huge apparatus and the three most complete facsimiles of the manuscript.
Daily Life in a Village in the Yasin Valley, Pakistan
Author:
In A Mountain Oasis, Susan York presents a richly illustrated socio-economic study of village life in Pakistan’s Yasin Valley, undertaken during one year spent living with a local family. It documents this dynamic agro-pastoral society at a time when few researchers were recording developments in these far-flung and difficult to reach mountain oases of the Hindukush. It is a record of a time when development interventions were in their beginnings, and before this area in Gilgit-Baltistan entered a crucial period of transformation. It provides solid comparative reference material for future research on this region, which is continuing to undergo challenging and complex changes.
The Iberian world played a key role in the global trade of enslaved people from the 15th century onwards. Scholars of Iberian forms of slavery face challenges accessing the subjectivity of the enslaved, given the scarcity of autobiographical sources. This book offers a compelling example of innovative methodologies that draw on alternative archives and documents, such as inquisitorial and trial records, to examine enslaved individuals' and collective subjectivities under Iberian political dominion. It explores themes such as race, gender, labour, social mobility and emancipation, religion, and politics, shedding light on the lived experiences of those enslaved in the Iberian world from the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic.
Contributors are: Sophia Blea Nuñez, Magdalena Candioti, Patricia Faria e Souza, James Fujitani, João José dos Reis, , Michel Kabalan, Silvia Lara, Marta Macedo, Hebe Mattos, Michelle McKinley, Robson Pedroso Costa, Fernanda Pinheiro, Rômulo da Silva Ehalt, Lisa Surwillo, Miguel Valerio and Lisa Voigt
Culture, Diplomacy and Interactions
Series Editor:
The era of globalization has witnessed both increased activities across borders and interactions between nations, especially between the East and the West. East and West: Culture, Diplomacy and Interactions aims to trace and investigate multiple-dimensional interactions between the East and the West from the Age of Sail to the Modern Era, culturally, socially, economically and diplomatically, with a focus on maritime history via and centered on port cities such as Macao, Goa, Melaka, Nagasaki in the East and their counterparts such as Lisbon, Seville, Amsterdam, London in the West. The series examines matters about empires, oceans, and human connections through changes in material lives and cultural politics, and analyzes the impact of the flow of cultural materials across oceans, such as artifacts, arts, goods, foods, books, knowledge, beliefs, etc., on port cities and urbanization. Particularly, it will provide readers with a new maritime vision of the East and Southeast Asian history of connections at the eastern end of the Maritime Silk Road, including the ports of East Indian Ocean and South China Sea: places from Nagasaki to Xiamen/Macao, from Singapore to Shanghai, from Hong Kong to Melbourne, etc. In doing so, it will unfold the process of formation and transformation of networks and fluxing space, generated or altered by trade, migrations, diplomacies, regional conglomerations, etc., illustrate the glocolization of religions, examine the relationship of culture/tradition and diplomatic strategy, and demonstrate the causes to miscommunication, misunderstanding, conflicts and confrontations between nations as well as appropriate reading, understanding and interpreting of each other.

East and West will include studies in such disciplines and area studies as maritime history, missionary history, intellectual history, international relations, arts, architecture, music, religious studies, and cultural studies. This series will feature monographs and edited volumes as well as translated works. It will be of interest to academics as well as general readers, including historians, artists, architects, diplomats, politicians, journalists, travelers, religious groups, businessmen, lawyers, among other groups.

Authors are cordially invited to submit proposals and/or full manuscripts to the publisher at BRILL, Stephanie Carta and Masja Horn.

Please see our Guidelines for a Book Proposal. All submissions are subject to a double-anonymous peer review process prior to publication.
Author:
In the early twentieth century, the first large batch of Chinese civil engineers had graduated from the USA, and together with their American senior colleagues returned to China. They were enthusiastic about reconstructing the young republic by building new railways, highways, and canals, but what the engineers experienced in China, including mismanaged railways, useless highways, and silted canals, did not always meet their expectations and ideals. In this book, Thorben Pelzer makes the stories of these Chinese and American engineers come to life through exploring previously unpublished letters, rare images, maps, and a rich biographical dataset. He argues that the experiences of these engineers include a myriad of contradictions, disillusionment, and discontent, keeping the engineering profession in a constant flux of searching for its meaning and its place in Republican China.
Series Editors: and
Chronicles of Contemporary Chinese Social Life includes part of the data collected at the Fudan Data Center for Contemporary Chinese Social Life by Professor Zhang Letian and his team from grassroots society in China, either directly from the owner/author or from collectors who work with the original owner/author. The data is systematic and comprehensive in a self-standing way. All the data that were selected for publication are from a particular rural collective, an urban work-unit, or a residential community and thus reflect the wholeness of the given unit of social life. These data all stretch for a time span of ten years or more, providing enough temporal depth for research and better understanding. These non-aggregated data at the grassroots level systematically reflect the real social life of a particular community over a long time period; they are rich in details for both in-depth case studies and comparative studies. As these kinds of data have never been published before, this publication is truly unique and original.

The targeted readers include China scholars around the world, particularly those whose research focus on contemporary or post-1949 China and/or teaching courses for the same period, graduate students in the same fields for both learning and their own research, and some individuals from the concerned public who want to learn more about Chinese social life by engaging in original and untouched empirical data.
Author:
Translator:
Ernest Mandel (1923–1995) was one of the best-known Marxist scholars active in the second half of the twentieth century. A leading member of the Fourth International, his books on capitalist economics, bureaucracies in the workers’ movement and on power and socialist strategy were translated into many languages. Democratic self-organisation of workers was a red thread that ran through all of his thinking. In Against Capitalism and Bureaucracy, Manuel Kellner presents the first and until now only comprehensive overview of Mandel’s theoretical and political contributions, arguing that his work remains important for the debates on a socialist alternative in the twenty-first century.
In 1870, a prominent samurai from Tōhoku sells his castle to become an agrarian colonist in Hokkaidō. Decades later, a man also from northeast Japan stows away on a boat to Canada and establishes a salmon roe business. By 1930, an investigative journalist travels to Brazil and writes a book that wins the first-ever Akutagawa Prize. In the 1940s, residents from the same area proclaim that they should lead Imperial Japan in colonizing all of Asia.

Across decades and oceans, these fractured narratives seem disparate, but show how mobility is central to the history of Japan’s Tōhoku region, a place often stereotyped as a site of rural stasis and traditional immobility, thereby collapsing boundaries between local, national, and global studies of Japan.

This book examines how multiple mobilities converge in Japan’s supposed hinterland. Drawing on research from three continents, this monograph demonstrates that Tohoku’s regional identity is inextricably intertwined with Pacific migrations.
In the past decades, the world has watched the rise of China as an economic and military power and the emergence of Chinese transnational elites. What may seem like an entirely new phenomenon marks the revival of a trend initiated at the end of the Qing. The redistribution of power, wealth and knowledge among the newly formed elites matured during the Republican period.
This volume demonstrates both the difficulty and the value of re-thinking the elites in modern China. It establishes that the study of the dynamic tensions within the elite and among elite groups in this epochal era is within reach if we are prepared to embrace forms of historical inquiry that integrate the abundant and even limitless historical resources, and to engage with the rich repertoire of digital techniques/instruments available and question our previous research paradigms.
This renewed approach brings historical research closer to an integrative data-rich history of modern China.