Awards shape careers, make research visible, and create role models. They provide evidence of prestige and credit and play a key role in evaluating individual scientists. Nevertheless, the understanding of prize cultures in science has remained surprisingly superficial. This book explores the prize cultures of the most famous scientific award worldwide: the Nobel Prize. It contributes to modern approaches in history and sociology of science that focus on the social context of scientific pract...

The book outlines a dramatic history of the failed liberalization of Japanese private law during the Meiji era. Once Japan overthrew the shogunate and fully opened up to contact with the world, modernization of the backward country and its fragmented customary legal system became a crucial objective of the new ruling elites. The initiated codification of law included the drafting of the first Civil Code, designed to revolutionize the traditional societal ties in Japan. The legal project, seem...

'Bodies beyond Binaries' advances the historiographical debate around the body in colonial and postcolonial Asia. Opening new research avenues that go beyond the binaries that have sometimes permeated previous scholarly contributions, this book explores not just the direct colonial encounter, but also wider global interconnections and flows involved in the making of knowledge, cultural constructions, and ‘techniques’ of the body.

Throughout the volume, critical concepts such as gender, s...

This volume traces how colonial powers from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century built, adapted, and expanded systems of slave trading and coerced labour across different regions of the globe. Bringing together diverse geographical perspectives and source materials, the contributors investigate how European practices of enslavement—shaped above all by experiences in the Atlantic world—were transferred to, or reshaped by, societies in the Indian Ocean and Asia. In examining the manageme...

In 1860, seventeen-year-old samurai Tateishi Onojirō, nicknamed “Tommy,” made headlines across America for his real and imagined adventures as part of the 1860 Japanese Embassy, the first Japanese diplomatic mission to the United States. The perception of Tateishi’s interracial romantic encounters with American women opened up to controversy and questioning the hierarchies of race and culture fundamental to many antebellum American concepts of civilization. This book reveals how Tateis...

This edited volume reflects the latest research on Rapa Nui and the Pacific in the fields of archaeology, education, history, Indigenous studies and museology. Archaeologists show the relationship between value judgments, archaeological data and mapping; economic, ideological and socio-political interactions and stone quarrying; rock art and voyaging histories and Rapa Nui astronomy. The book pays attention to European views including those of the explorer Jacob Roggeveen, the expedition lead...

This 43th volume of the ASLU series presents a useful GIS procedure to study settlement patterns in landscape archaeology. In several Mediterranean regions archaeological sites have been mapped by fieldwalking surveys, producing large amounts of data. These legacy site-based survey data represent an important resource to study ancient settlement organization. Methodological procedures are necessary to cope with the limits of these data, and more importantly with the distortions on data patter...