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428 results in Area Studies

Page 1 of 22

Reactionary Politics in South Korea
  • Historical Legacies, Far-Right Intellectuals, and Political Mobilization
  • Myungji Yang
  • Expected online publication date:
    November 2025
    Print publication:
    18 December 2025
  • In December 2024, South Korean president Yoon Seok-yeol stunned the world by declaring martial law. More puzzling was that Yoon's insurrection unexpectedly gained substantial support from the ruling right-wing party and many citizens. Why do ordinary citizens support authoritarian leaders and martial law in a democratic country? What draws them to extreme actions and ideas? With the rise of illiberal, far-right politics across the globe, Reactionary Politics in South Korea provides an in-depth account of the ideas and practices of far-right groups and organizations threatening democratic systems. Drawing on eighteen months of field research and rich qualitative data, Myungji Yang helps explain the roots of current democratic regression. Yang provides vivid details of on-the-ground internal dynamics of far-right actors and their communities and worldviews, uncovering the organizational and popular foundations of far-right politics and movements.

The North Caucasian Kingdom of Alania, 850–1240
  • John Latham-Sprinkle
  • Expected online publication date:
    November 2025
    Print publication:
    21 August 2025
  • The kingdom of Alania was the most powerful polity in the medieval North Caucasus. It contained strategic mountain passes across the Caucasus mountains, as well as urban centres larger than any in contemporary Rus'. Its kings retained power from the mid-ninth to the late eleventh centuries, intermarried with the ruling families of Georgia and Byzantium, and led armies that terrorised the South Caucasus. In this, the first book to explore the subject in the English language, Latham-Sprinkle sheds light on how the kings of Alania came to embody 'the power of the foreign' – the status which accrued to individuals who could access the material and spiritual products of distant lands – thus rendering the development of a state structure unnecessary. Challenging existing narratives that centre elites and the state, Latham-Sprinkle provides an important contribution to the historiography of medieval state formation, Christianisation, and transregional connection. This title is part of the Flip it Open programme and may also be available open access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.

Inter-Asian Law
  • Edited by Matthew S. Erie, Ching-Fu Lin
  • Published online:
    16 December 2025
    Print publication:
    22 January 2026
  • What happens when Western law is no longer the default referent for legal modernity? This is a deceptively simple question, but its implications are significant for such fields as comparative law, international law, and law and development. Whereas much of comparative law is predicated on the idea that modern law flows West to East and North to South, this volume proposes the paradigm of 'Inter-Asian Law' (IAL), pointing to an emerging field of comparative law that explores the legal interactions between and among Asian jurisdictions. This volume is an experimental and preliminary effort to think through other beginnings and endings for law's movement from one jurisdiction to another, laying the grounds for new interactions between legal systems. In addition to providing an analytical framework to study IAL, the volume consists of fifteen chapters written by scholars from Asia and who study Asia that provide doctrinal and empirical accounts of IAL. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Mind and Psychology in Early China

Mind and Psychology in Early China
  • Lisa Raphals
  • Published online:
    16 December 2025
    Print publication:
    22 January 2026
  • This Element describes early Chinese views of the heart-mind (xin 心) and its relation to the psychology of a whole person, including the body, affective and cognitive faculties, and the spirit (shén 神). It argues for a divergence in Warring States thought between 'mind-centered' and 'spirit-centered' approaches to self-cultivation. It surveys the Analects, Mengzi, Guanzi, Zhuangzi, Xunzi, Huainanzi, the Huangdi neijing, and excavated medical manuscripts from Mawangdui, as well as a brief comparative perspective to ancient Greek views of these topics. It argues for a contrast between post-Cartesian dualism and Chinese and Greek psycho-physicalism.

A History of Poetry in Italy
  • 1200–1600
  • Edited by Guyda Armstrong, Rhiannon Daniels, Catherine Keen
  • Published online:
    15 December 2025
    Print publication:
    22 January 2026
  • Widening the perspective offered by the traditional canon, this history reveals the poetry of Italy between 1200 and 1600 as a site of plurality of genre, form and even language, including not just written texts but also those presented in performance. Within this inclusive framing, poetry's content, its cultural and geographical contexts and its material media of transmission are given equal weight. Decentring major figures and their texts while recognising their broad influence, the innovative theoretical and methodological framework complements the variety and liveliness of poetic activity on the Italian peninsula over four centuries, from the first manuscript experiments in verse through to sophisticated print productions and elaborate performance media. Offering original, multidisciplinary insights into current debates and discoveries, this history enlarges the scope of what we understand Italian premodern poetry to be.

Between Empire and Nation
  • South Asian Humanitarianism in the late Colonial Period
  • Maria Framke
  • Published online:
    15 December 2025
    Print publication:
    01 May 2027

The Politics of Corporations in ‘New’ India
  • Edited by Rohit Varman
  • Published online:
    15 December 2025
    Print publication:
    31 January 2026
  • This volume examines how the rise of Hindutva to power is linked to the interests of large corporations in neoliberal India. It interprets Hindutva as a fascist force and as a capitalist counter-revolution wearing a popular mask that demands a repressive imposition of order to facilitate accumulation. The book delves into different aspects of the relationship between Hindutva and large corporations. Various chapters cast in high relief how the fascist shields of religion and nationalism are deployed to further corporate profiteering. This book is also a reminder that fascism has inherent limitations and is incapable of resolving crises that give rise to it. However, its ascendance, albeit temporary, is causing widespread destruction. The volume argues that fascist destruction in contemporary India can only be effectively restricted by containing the ravages of neoliberalism and corporate loot.

Challenging the Caliphate
  • Wahhabism and Mahdism in the Late Ottoman Empire
  • Ömer Koçyiğit
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    December 2025
    Print publication:
    08 January 2026
  • How did steam transportation and print culture reshape the Ottoman Empire's centre-periphery relations in the nineteenth century? Challenging the Caliphate offers a fresh perspective on modernization in the Muslim world, exploring how these developments in infrastructure, technology, and communications impacted ideas of the Caliphate, Wahhabism, and Mahdism. Through rich archival research and microhistorical examples, Ömer Koçyiğit demonstrates how new technologies influenced political authority, religious movements, and the spread of ideas. Koçyiğit further explores how the Ottoman Empire dealt with the rise of the Wahhabi movement in the Najd and the Mahdi movement in Sudan. This study situates the Ottoman experience within global transformations, offering a deeper understanding of state, resistance, and connectivity while highlighting how emerging technologies shaped the modern Muslim world.

Death, Diversion, and Departure
  • Voter Exit and the Persistence of Authoritarianism in Zimbabwe
  • Chipo Dendere
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    December 2025
    Print publication:
    22 January 2026
  • There are many explanations for the survival of long-serving political parties, from access to state wealth to the use of excessive violence. A yet unexplored reason, particularly for parties that have survived under extreme conditions, is voter exit. In Death, Diversion, and Departure, Chipo Dendere shows that voter exit creates new opportunities for authoritarian regime survival. With an empirical focus on Zimbabwe, Dendere centers two types of voter exit: death and migration. She shows how the exit of young, urban, and working professional voters because of mass death due to the AIDS pandemic and mass migration in the wake of economic decline has increased the resilience of a regime that may have otherwise lost power. With authoritarianism on the rise globally and many citizens considering leaving home, Death, Diversion, and Departure provides timely insights into the impact of voter exit.

A Hundred Flowers
  • How Literature Shaped Maoism
  • Dayton Lekner
  • Published online:
    12 December 2025
    Print publication:
    08 January 2026
  • In 1957, Shanghai journalism student Xu Chengmiao faced persecution for a poem about flowers. Why did his classmates, teachers, and eventually the full force of the Party-state react so intensely to Xu's floral poetry? What connection did his writing have to the flowers that had adorned Chinese literature, art, reportage, and fashion since 1954? In this captivating book, Dayton Lekner tells the story of the Hundred Flowers, from its early blooms to its transformation into the Anti-Rightist campaign. Through the work and lives of creative writers, he shows that the literary circulation and practices that had long characterized China not only survived under Maoism but animated political and social movements. Texts 'went viral,' writers rose and fell, and metaphors mattered. Exploring the dynamism, nuance, and legion authors of 'official discourse,' he relocates creative writing not in tension with Mao era politics but as a central medium of the revolution.

The Reformation of Liturgy
  • Matter and Time Reconceived
  • Lee Palmer Wandel
  • Published online:
    12 December 2025
    Print publication:
    22 January 2026
  • Why were sixteenth-century Europeans willing to risk their lives to attack 'mere matter' - images, lamps, altars, vestments? The most influential medieval liturgical commentary, William Durand's Rationale divinorum officiorum, offers an answer. Reading Durand to excavate the meaning of churches, altars, vestments, this book reveals the stunning scope of Reformation reconceptualization of worship, time, and matter. For Durand, liturgy was an ongoing praxis in which Scripture and Creation were in constant dialogue, leading to an ever-richer understanding of divine revelation. In attacking the made world - what human beings had fashioned from prime matter - Protestants sundered Creation from the liturgy and fundamentally changed how liturgy was understood, and what both Protestants and Catholics held the relationship between divine revelation and matter to be. Altars and vestments became 'objects' to which human beings gave meaning. As the sixteenth century redefined liturgy as a verbal practice, time, matter, and worship were realigned.

The Cambridge Companion to Counter-Reformation Sanctity
  • Edited by Jan Machielsen, Emily Michelson, Katrina B. Olds
  • Published online:
    12 December 2025
    Print publication:
    08 January 2026
  • This groundbreaking Companion explores how Counter-Reformation sanctity reshaped religious identities, sacred traditions, and devotional practices that transformed Catholicism into the first global religion. Offering a fresh perspective on early modern Catholicism, it moves beyond traditional debates about Reformation and Reform and presents sanctity as the defining lens through which to view the period's transformative changes. By examining the lives, representations, and global impact of saints, the Companion demonstrates how sanctity countered the Protestant challenge and also transformed the very fabric of Catholicism between 1500 and 1750. Organized into four thematic sections – models of sanctity, the creation and contestation of sanctity, the representation of saints, and everyday interactions with saints – the volume also provides insight into the role of holiness during this pivotal period in Church history. Connecting history, theology, art history, and material culture, this interdisciplinary Companion serves as an indispensable resource for scholars and students seeking a comprehensive understanding of early modern Catholicism's influence on European and global history.

Violín
  • Mediating Musical Style and Devotional Practice in 21st-Century Cuba
  • Robin D. Moore
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    December 2025
    Print publication:
    20 November 2025
  • Afrodescendant religious music in the Caribbean and Latin America typically foregrounds drumming and centuries-old songs of praise to spirit deities. In recent years, a new form of worship, known as a violín or toque de violín, which features the violin alongside the guitar, electronic piano, and/or other instruments commonly associated with popular music, has gained popularity in Cuba. Violines can be understood as loosely defined spaces for performance that developed in a context of cultural oppression and dominance. They can be viewed as a concession to Eurocentric and secular tastes, or as a blackening/creolizing of those same practices, or both. They express religious faith in pluralistic ways, incorporating repertoire from various Black religions alongside influences from folk Catholicism, and classical, commercial, and folkloric music. Drawing from an encyclopedic knowledge of Cuban music, ethnographic work, and interviews, Robin D. Moore's groundbreaking book is the first to explore the compelling violín ceremony in detail.

Connected Cartographies
  • World Geography and the Sino-Western Translation of Knowledge, 1580-1842
  • Florin-Stefan Morar
  • Published online:
    11 December 2025
    Print publication:
    22 January 2026
  • In the 'Age of Discovery', explorers brought a wealth of information about new and strange lands from across the oceans. Yet, even as the Americas appeared on new world maps, China remained a cartographic mystery. How was the puzzle of China's geography unravelled? Connected Cartographies demonstrates that knowledge about China was generated differently, not through exploration but through a fascinating bi-directional cross-cultural exchange of knowledge. Florin-Stefan Morar shows that interactions between Chinese and Western cartographic traditions led to the creation of a new genre of maps that incorporated features from both. This genre included works by renowned cartographers such as Abraham Ortelius and Matteo Ricci and other less-known works, 'black tulips of cartography,' hidden in special collections. Morar builds upon original sources in multiple languages from archives across three continents, producing a pioneering reconstruction of Sino-Western cartographic exchanges that shaped the modern world map and our shared global perspective.

The Italian Renaissance
  • A Cultural History
  • 2nd edition
  • Virginia Cox
  • Published online:
    11 December 2025
    Print publication:
    31 December 2025
  • The extraordinary creative energy of Renaissance Italy lies at the root of modern Western culture. In this magisterial study, Virginia Cox offers a fresh vision of this iconic moment in cultural history. Her lucid and absorbing book explores key artistic, literary and intellectual developments, as well as histories of food and fashion, map-making, exploration and anatomy. Alongside towering figures from Petrarch and Boccaccio to Leonardo, Machiavelli, and Isabella d'Este, Cox unveils lesser-known Renaissance protagonists including printers, travel writers, actresses, courtesans, explorers-even celebrity chefs. This extensively revised and expanded edition includes an incisive overview of Italy's relationship with the European and non-European worlds, embracing ethnic and religious diversity within Italy, the global dissemination and hybridization of Italian Renaissance culture, and Italian global encounters, including Jesuit missions to Asia. Pulling together the latest scholarship with original research and insight, Cox's book speaks both to general readers and specialists in the field.
Social Change across the End of the Aegean Bronze Age

Social Change across the End of the Aegean Bronze Age
  • Antonis Kotsonas
  • Published online:
    10 December 2025
    Print publication:
    08 January 2026
    • Element
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  • For a long time, scholarship on the end of the Aegean Bronze Age has been preoccupied with political, ethnic/racial, economic, environmental, and other change; however, it has rarely centered the discussion on social change. Drawing from anthropological and sociological critiques of social change, the Element compares the Greek archaeological record before and after the collapse of 1200 BCE, focusing on developments in the 12th to early 10th centuries, which are examined against the background of the Mycenaean palatial system of the 14th and 13th centuries. The seven sections of the Element cover the reasons for the collapse of the Mycenaean palaces; socio-political, demographic, and socio-economic change after the collapse; and the manifestation of this change in settlements, burials, and sanctuaries. The Appendix offers a discussion of the relative and absolute chronologies of the period, with emphasis on recent important but debatable suggestions for revisions.

Five Economies of World Literature
  • Sandor Hites
  • Published online:
    09 December 2025
    Print publication:
    31 December 2025
  • Five Economies of World Literature is a comprehensive revision of nineteenth-century conceptualizations of 'world literature' in view of their intersections with economic thought. The book demonstrates that with a routinized identification of world literature as the cultural manifestation of modern capitalism, recent discussions have lost sight of an important historical and conceptual dynamic. Based on reinterpretations of the work of Goethe, Thomas Carlyle, Fichte, Hugó von Meltzl, and Marx, the chapters center on five economic notions (free trade, the gift, central planning, protectionism, and common ownership) that have shaped the theory and praxis of transnational exchange. At a time of profound reconfigurations in global political, cultural, and economic landscapes, this analysis deepens our historical understanding of cross-cultural encounters and also offers a better grasp of many of our current concerns about the globalization of cultural production and consumption.
The Phonetics of Tarifit

The Phonetics of Tarifit
  • Variation and Change in a Moroccan Amazigh Language
  • Mohamed Afkir, Georgia Zellou
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    December 2025
    Print publication:
    31 January 2026
  • Tarifit is an Amazigh language spoken in northern Morocco. This Element provides an overview of some aspects of the phonetics of this under-studied language, focusing on patterns of variation and ongoing sound changes. An acoustic analysis of productions by native speakers is provided, comparing clear and fast speaking styles, focusing on the phonetic realization of vowels in Tarifit: three full vowels /a, i, and u/, and variation in the realization of schwa. The analysis reveals phonetically vowelless words in Tarifit: vowelless productions are a rare, but are allowable variants of some words (especially those containing multiple voiceless obstruents). Another ongoing sound change is explored: post-vocalic /r/ deletion. We find higher rates of r-dropping by female speakers. A perception study investigating native speakers' discrimination of words is presented. This Element discusses what the findings have for models of phonetic variation, individual differences in language production, and sound change theory.

Invisible Fatherland
  • Constitutional Patriotism in Weimar Germany
  • Manuela Achilles
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    December 2025
    Print publication:
    22 January 2026
  • Weimar Germany is often remembered as the ultimate political disaster, a democracy whose catastrophic end directly led to Adolf Hitler's rise. Invisible Fatherland challenges this narrative by recovering the nuanced and sophisticated efforts of Weimar contemporaries to make democracy work in Germany-efforts often obscured by the Republic's eventual collapse. In doing so, Manuela Achilles reveals a unique form of constitutional patriotism that was rooted in openness, compromise, and the capacity to manage conflict. Authoritative yet accessible, Invisible Fatherland contrasts Weimar's pluralistic democratic practices with the rigid tendencies in contemporary thought, including Rudolf Smend's theory of symbolic integration and Karl Löwenstein's concept of militant democracy. Both theories, though influential, restrict the positive potential of open, conflict-driven democratic processes. This study challenges us to appreciate the fundamental fluidity and pluralism of liberal democracy and to reflect on its resilience in the face of illiberal and authoritarian threats-an urgent task in our time.
Clothing Bodies

Clothing Bodies
  • Weaving and Textiles in the Aegean Bronze Age
  • Sophia Vakirtzi
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    December 2025
    Print publication:
    31 January 2026
  • This Element explores the textile crafts and cloth cultures of the Aegean Bronze Age, focusing on two categories of archaeological evidence: excavated textiles (or their imprints) and tools used for yarn production and weaving. Together, these types of material testimonies offer complementary perspectives on a textile history that spans 2,000 years. A gro wing body of evidence suggests that the Aegean was home to communities of skilled textile craftspeople who produced cloth ranging from plain and coarse to fine and elaborate. As regional connectivity increased throughout the Bronze Age, interactions in textile craft flourished. In time, textile production became central to the political economies that emerged in the Aegean region. The expertise of Bronze Age Aegean spinners and weavers is vividly illustrated through the material record of their tools, while even the smallest excavated cloth fragments stand as fragile, yet enduring testaments to textile craftsmanship.

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