It is the paradox at the heart of the Dutch Republic: how could a state emerge from resistance to political slavery and subjugation by a foreign power, only to become a colonial empire that promoted slavery all over the world? Slavery and the Dutch State shows how the modern Dutch state and its predecessors were complicit in colonial slavery. It describes the roles of various actors, such as enslaved people, administrators and merchants in the Netherlands and the colonized societies. More tha...

Ancient civilizations often developed near major rivers, like in Egypt and Mesopotamia. In Central Asia, the Murghab alluvial fan in southern Turkmenistan was central to the emergence of the Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex (BMAC), also known as the Oxus Civilization, during the third and second millennia BCE. The local alluvial fan was central for the productive agriculture at the basis of the region's urban centers and the wealth that accumulated in these societies.

This volume expl...

This book provides a critical assessment of the broadly held view that states ‘own’ war. The central theme of the book is that the persistence of non-state actors in historical as well as contemporary conflicts challenges this narrative. It takes a multidisciplinary approach to address a host of questions concerning the role of non-state actors, both armed and unarmed, in conflict and their relationship with states. Recurring themes are issues of loyalty, accountability and effectiveness....

Increased existential threats demand that Western Democracies and their armed forces can swiftly scale up, rapidly expanding their capabilities to deter potential adversaries and defend borders effectively. The principle of scaling also applies to crisis response systems in general; the larger the disaster scope, the more crucial scalability becomes to alleviate suffering. From a multidisciplinary viewpoint, this book introduces fresh insights into the concept of scaling by examining scalabil...

'Rethinking Environmental Governance' brings to light the pluralistic views, diverse forces, and multiple realities (re)shaping formal and informal decision-making structures, processes, and power interplay in environmental governance. Linking socio-economic drivers with the evolution of cultural norms, the (re)shaping of institutional arrangements, and ever-changing power relations, the book looks at processes of institutional emergence across spatio-temporal scales. Through case study illus...

This book presents the first-ever English translation of 'The Open Door to Hidden Paganism', one of the earliest and most detailed studies of South Indian Hinduism. Written in 1651 by Abraham Rogerius, a Dutch East India Company clergyman and missionary, it offers an unexpectedly balanced account of the customs and traditions of the South Indian Brahmins. This made it a cornerstone of early European Indology.

In addition to the Dutch original, this edition includes a full English translation...

International Studies aims to understand the global complexities of the world in which we live today. Central in these complexities is the position of the human individual, who is both an actor and reactor in global events. This textbook introduces three I's – interests, identities, ideas – that provide a framework to understand human behaviour in today's world. The role of people is further elaborated in the three spatial dimensions of the local, regional, and global level. This gives In...

By the closing decades of the 19th century, photography and postcard-production arrived in British Malaya. The colonial-era postcards that were produced up to the 1940s captured virtually all aspects of life in the British colony and remain as visual testimonies of how the colonial subjects at the time lived and worked, as well as their relationship to the land. And yet, despite the developments in photography and postcard-production, the images that were produced also reiterated and reproduc...

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 ...