'Rethinking Ostia' presents an archaeological and spatial approach to Roman urbanism, focused on Rome's port city. It takes the reader along the route of a 'spatial investigation', offering a fresh look and detailed insights into the past society and the built environment of this port town. Following a scaled approach, the book examines different aspects of Ostia's urban landscape, applying Space Syntax's methods for spatial analysis to the urban neighbourhood of one city block - Insula IV ii...

Over the last few decades, western archaeology increasingly abandoned its 'ivory tower' in order to investigate, negotiate and develop its position and role in global society. The way in which we deal with other peoples views in the interpretation of archaeological materials, the way in which we integrate our narratives and practices with other heritage demands,and the way in which we deal with power differences in both these processes; all are challenging issues when undertaking archaeologic...

The unpublished writings of a Dutch colonial official, Pieter Albert Bik (1798-1855) are studied and contextualized in this book. The remarkable autobiographical manuscript of Bik, which is here presented in English translation with annotations, provides a unique glimpse of the wide horizons of the world of Dutch colonialism, tracing his many journeys in Europe, the Dutch East Indies and Japan as well as across the oceans in the first half of the nineteenth century.

In this work, Mikko Toivan...

How Muslims in Indonesia consider their religious practices, politics and culture as Islamic is described in this volume. By examining the various ways Bima Muslims constitute their Islamic identities and agencies through rituals and festivals, this book argues that religious practice is still vigorous in present Bima. It explores the reproduction of religious meanings among various local Muslims and the differences between social groups. Islam is represented as divided between the traditiona...

This book provides a fresh reinterpretation of the global spread of modern leisure travel in the middle of the nineteenth century through a critical comparative reading of twenty-two works of popular travel writing from maritime Southeast Asia and Ceylon. The examination of these books reveals a coherent genre that was seemingly frivolous yet in fact intensely political, with shared rules and tropes that served to legitimise colonial rule and codify aspects of colonial culture in the popular ...

For almost half a century, NATO’s armies deterred a Soviet attack on Western Europe. Today, they once again provide a check on Russia's revanchist agenda. As in the Cold War, if Russia’s aggression escalates to armed conflict, the Alliance’s armies will likely bear the brunt of the fighting. Thus, a study of the national armies that comprised NATO during the Cold War has both historical and current relevance.

Each chapter offers an analysis of how the respective constituent NATO army ...

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 relati...

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 Sosho" (War History Series). These volumes give a detailed account of the operations of the Imperial Japanese Army and the Imperial Japanese Navy during the Second World War. Volume 3 of the series, "The Invasion of the Dutch East Indies", describes in depth the campaign to gain control over ...

This book presents three of the works of Abduʾl-Bahā, son of the founder of the Bahāʾi Faith, dealing 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 waken and educate the masses. In this work, Abduʾl-Bahā gives virtuous and progressive Islamic clerics a leading role among th...

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 a migration stream could have become a reality. They also indicate reasons why this scheme failed: it was bogged down by differe...