'Beyond Orientalism: Sir William Jones (1746-1794), A Journey of Understanding' reconfigures our understanding of Orientalism, the formation of British Romanticism, colonialism, and late eighteenth-century British India. This volume examines the enduring legacy of Sir William Jones, a seminal figure in the intellectual exchange between East and West during the Enlightenment. Through a rigorous analysis of Jones's translations, annotations, and original compositions, the book elucidates his pr...

'Expeditions in Persia: Exploring Qajar Persia in two 19th-Century Diaries' unveils the intricacies of 19th-century Persian expeditions through two complementary travelogues. The first account, with an anonymous author (attributed to Sir John Malcolm), offers a detailed diplomatic and historical perspective on the journey through Persia during an East India Company mission led by Sir John Malcolm. The second travelogue, written by Mirza Saleh, an Iranian intellectual and later diplomat, chron...

This volume intervenes in the growing field of transimperial history, which explores interactions across empires—European and non-European—between the mid-1800s and mid-1900s, a period of heightened imperial entanglement. It focuses on how actors from one empire came to know, interpret, and position themselves in relation to actors from other empires, emphasizing the role of socio-professional profiles, informal networks, and formal institutions. The volume is structured around three them...

For around 150 years, the richly illustrated Wigalois manuscript from Amelungsborn Abbey in Germany has rested largely unnoticed in the collections of Leiden University Library. Only recently has this unique codex, known as LTK 537, begun to attract the scholarly attention it deserves.

This volume offers the first full transcription of the manuscript's Middle High German text, accompanied by an accessible introduction and detailed commentary. In combining textual accuracy with contextual dep...

This book considers the interplay between the affordances of technologies, the experiences and processes of technological systems, and the process of learning and adaptation by state actors as part of governance reform in China. It offers detailed studies of specific projects and applications that are automated or quasi-automated in organising and governing social, economic, and cultural lives in the world’s largest techno-authoritarian regime. Written by scholars from six countries across ...

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...

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...

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...