Books published by Amsterdam University Press

Key to China's plans to promote rural development is the de-marginalisation of the countryside through the incorporation of rural areas into the urban-based market-oriented financial system. For this reason, Chinese development planners have turned to microcredit -- i.e. the provision of small-scale loans to 'financially excluded' rural households -- as a means of increasing 'financial consciousness' and facilitating rural de-marginalisation. Drawing on in-depth fieldwork in rural China, this book examines the formulation, implementation and outcomes of government-run microcredit programmes in China-illuminating the diverse roles that microcredit plays in local processes of socioeconomic development and the livelihoods of local actors. It details how microcredit facilitates de-marginalisation for some, while simultaneously exacerbating the marginalisation of others; and exposes the ways in which microcredit and other top-down development strategies reflect and reinforce the contradictions and paradoxes implicit in rural China's contemporary development landscape.

Against the grain of the growing literature on screens, Screen Genealogies argues that the present excess of screens cannot be understood as an expansion and multiplication of the movie screen, nor of the video display.

Important essays on our financial sector and the search for a more resilient system

In Minor Platforms in Videogame History, Benjamin Nicoll argues that 'minor' game histories are anything but insignificant.

This book examines the Kashmir dispute from a borderland perspective, adopting the novel approach of understanding the conflict from both sides of the Line of Control (LoC). The aim is to investigate the political space the border has created.

This book analyses the earliest representations of Cleopatra in drama produced across Italy and England over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

This edited volume is a reappraisal of the legacy and historiographical impact of Johan Huizinga's 1919 masterwork for the centenary of its publication in the field of medieval history, art history, and cultural studies.

This volume collects essays on Anton Pannekoek and his contemporaries at the crossroads of political history, the history of science and art history.

This ground-breaking collection of essays examines the evolving taste for Bolognese art during the seventeenth century, both within and outside Bologna itself, based on new archival research and also exploring issues of gender, class, and regional preferences during the Seicento.

This book focuses on cross-border marriages between mainland Chinese women and Hong Kong men, a phenomenon which is of critical importance to the transformation of Hong Kong.

The paradox of ornament and monstrosity launches an array of thought-provoking perspectives on sixteenth-century visual art by targeting its ambiguous artificiality and moments of anxiety.

Breaking new ground in the study of post-socialist memory culture, this book explains why former GDR cadres replicate GDR memory culture against their stigmatized status in unified Germany.

This book explores one of the untold stories of the American military occupation of Japan, from 1945 to 1952, that of efforts by the Supreme Commander for the Allied Power's (SCAP) Arts and Monuments Division for the preservation of Japan's cultural heritage.

The book is the first study detailing the character, evolution, functioning and future of the smallholder and smallholdings across nine countries of East and Southeast Asia.

This collection considers new phenomena emerging in a convergence environment from the perspective of adaptation studies.

This book shows the role of popular culture in producing the socio-political authority of criminal leaders, gangs, mafias and cartels.

The ten essays in this book engage with some of the most critical urban questions of the near future across Asia.

Medieval states are widely assumed to have lacked police forces. Yet in the Italian city-republics, soldiers patrolled the streets daily in search of lawbreakers. *Police Power in the Italian Communes, 1228-1326* is the first book to examine the emergence of urban policing in medieval Italy and its impact on city life.[-][-]Focusing on Bologna in t

Traditional Javanese law of the pre- and early-colonial period does not draw upon the contents of recognized texts, but -- as preserved and often explained in those texts -- on maxims (sloka/saloka) containing the essence of law expressed in pithy, easily remembered phrases, many of which live on as modern Javanese proverbs.

The first ever ethnography of the newest commodity boom in China and the way it changed the economic fate of pastoralists on the Tibetan plateau.

This book analyses text, image and manuscript layout to deepen our understanding of the different ways in which Alfonso is presented as a learned king in the manuscripts he commissioned, and reassesses the number of manuscripts copied for him.

If language matters, then the interesting question naturally arises how politicians use language to their advantage? How do they use it to convince us of the truth of their views? These questions take us into the world of political framing, which has attracted a lot of attention in recent times and forms the subject of this book.