Kategoria BISAC: Social Science >> Developing & Emerging Countries

This book challenges the notion of a 'new' India, not by dismissing it as an imagined India, but by engaging in the debate as to what constitutes the new. It acknowledges that India is changing remarkably, while also acknowledging that in the overzealous enthusiasm about the new India there is collective amnesia about the other, older India. The essays argue that the increasing consolidation of capitalist markets of commodity production and consumption has unleashed not only economic growth and social change, but also introduced new contradictions associated with market dynamics in the...

India s northeastern region, forged by a unique geological history and peopled by several waves of migration, is extraordinarily complex. Farming systems in the hills and the riverine plains are embedded in a heterogeneous environment, comprising forests, wetlands and fields, shaped over centuries by nature and people. Today, the environment and economy are undergoing rapid transformation, affecting peoples lives, livelihoods and methods of food production.

The essays in this volume bring a multi-disciplinary perspective to critical aspects of the process of agricultural change, examine...

Winner of the 2012 George Perkins Marsh Prize for Best Book in Environmental History

In the twentieth century, the Mekong Delta has emerged as one of Vietnam's most important economic regions. Its swamps, marshes, creeks, and canals have played a major role in Vietnam's turbulent past, from the struggles of colonialism to the Cold War and the present day. Quagmire considers these struggles, their antecedents, and their legacies through the lens of environmental history.

Beginning with the French conquest in the 1860s, colonial reclamation schemes and pacification efforts...

In the last thirty years, there have been fierce debates over how civilizations develop and why the West became so powerful. The Measure of Civilization presents a brand-new way of investigating these questions and provides new tools for assessing the long-term growth of societies. Using a groundbreaking numerical index of social development that compares societies in different times and places, award-winning author Ian Morris sets forth a sweeping examination of Eastern and Western development across 15,000 years since the end of the last ice age. He offers surprising conclusions...