Books published by KIT Publishers

Visual Sources about Slavery in Asia.

August 26, 1945: Lotty Veffer arrived in Amsterdam. She was the only member of her family to have survived the war. Her parents and younger sister Carla had been gassed in Sobibor. There was no heartfelt welcome for her, and eventually she was forced to spend her first night back "home" in Amsterdam on a park bench on the Apollolaan. In September 2017, the ninety-six-year-old Lotty was honored with her own monument, a bench on the exact same spot where she had spent that first night. Lotty passed away on July 27, 2018.In Amsterdam alone there are more than eighty monuments created to remember the Holocaust. There are still many more locations that tell parts of the story: buildings, squares, and streets that were once silent witnesses to the darkest page in the city's history. The ninety-five vignettes in Lotty's Bench explore these monuments and locations to make clear how inextricably Amsterdam's history is linked to the persecution of its Jews.

This book is based upon a unique private collection of photographs and home movies of one Peranakan Chinese elite family, the Kwee family from Ciledug, owners of the sugar factory Djatipiring. It aims to bring the private lives of the modern Peranakan Chinese elite in colonial Java to the fore and asks to what extent ideas about progress, development and 'the modern' have affected their world-view and life-styles. This wonderful collection makes it possible to go beyond the public eye and get an inside glimpse into the changing world of a wealthy Peranakan Chinese family as it moved forward in the modernizing landscape of Java. The existing Western images and corresponding perspectives focus mainly on the nexus between the Westerners and the native population, sharing one common theme: none of them visualized the Chinese as 'carriers of modernity' or as 'agents of change'. Such a representation apparently did not fit the public consciousness and general research paradigms in which change, progress and modernity were mainly attributed to Western presence in the region. The Kwee family photo albums give the opportunity to redress the balance, thereby offering a new perspective on the social dynamics of late-colonial Java.

Natural History and Ecology of Suriname offers a unique overview of the remarkable nature of this diverse and beautiful country. The book showcases more than 200 fascinating tropical plant and animal species, making it an indispensable guide for anyone wanting to explore Suriname's remarkable flora and fauna. It also provides an introduction to the country's history, geology, climate, ecosystems, and more.World Wildlife Fund Guianas is part of the international World Wildlife Fund network, which has been supporting conservation work in Suriname since the 1960s.

"Trailblazers" -- a sequel to Nine Lives, is an odyssey that takes you around the world. It presents stories of eleven human rights defenders whose lives reflect Gandhi''s notion ''you must be the change you wish to see in the world.'' Nations, like individuals, have their whims and peculiarities. But what if the cost of those whims becomes unbearable? These testimonies have one thing in common: the local illustrates the global. The Inuit story illustrates global warming. The Sahrawi story illustrates that totalitarianism is alive and well. The Ecuadorian story illustrates why corporate social responsibility must be taken seriously -- all the way to the courthouse. In the end, the truth will come out. Sometimes, the last straw is nothing other than yourself.

As smallholder farmers switch to producing for the commercial market, they face a steep learning curve. To select a product and to market it effectively, they must understand both their immediate market situation and how the whole value chain works. Individual smallholders probably cannot grow enough on their own, so they have to get organised and sell their produce as a group. That takes leadership, organisation, mutual trust and a common vision. They need to access a range of business services: inputs, financial services, training, market information, transport, government support, and so on. And they need to plan their businesses: analyse their potential markets, identify customers, negotiate with buyers and suppliers, work out their costs and expected income, look at their longer term position in the value chain, develop a business plan, and put the plan into operation. How best to help groups of smallholders to gain these skills? This book describes a "learning alliance" approach that combines training, practical assignments to develop an enterprise, on-the-job coaching, and the sharing of experiences among several groups of farmers. The approach was piloted in Ethiopia from 2007 to 2010 with 18 groups of farmers in Amhara, Oromia, the Southern Nations, Nationalities and Peoples (SNNPR) regional states. It covered a wide range of commodities, from staple grains to dairy, coffee, legumes, honey and incense. Where normal training courses impart skills that farmers find hard to apply to their own situation and soon forget, the learning alliance enables them to apply new skills to their own situations, reinforces their new knowledge, and gives them hands-on, guided experience with building their own businesses. That makes a learning alliance a highly effective way of enabling farmers to build their businesses in a sustainable way.