Books published by Palgrave USA

Women often appear invisible in what is widely perceived as the male-oriented society of Islam. Women in the Medieval Islamic World seeks to redress the balance with a series of original essays on women in the pre-modern phase of Islamic history. The reader will encounter here a colourful portrait gallery of rulers, politicians, poets and patrons, as well as some larger than life fictitious females from the pages of Arabic, Persian and Turkish literature. No less authentic are the accounts of quiet or troubled lives of ordinary women preserved in the court records of Mamluk Egypt and Ottoman Turkey, reminders that historical research can resuscitate the lives of subaltern as well as elite women from the past. For people who believe that Muslim women, especially medieval Muslim women, have no history, this book demonstrates the ways in which research by twenty international scholars - sometimes working in their own distinct fields and sometimes in overlapping areas - can bring into focus the role and contribution of women in the development of Islamic history. There will no longer be an excuse for their exclusion.

This book examines Irish, Basque, and Carlist nationalism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The first chapter covers definitions of the nation and nationalism, the relationship of both to politics and ideology, and an overview of the inception and evolution of nationalism in Western Europe.

This book follows up the theoretical analysis of Ethnic Diversity and Public Policy with detailed case studies from leading international experts on Malaysia, Tanzania, Mauritius, Trinidad and Tobago, Northern Ireland, Spain, and the United States to discover what lessons can be learned for policy-makers in other divided societies.

Criticizes attempts to "biologize" consciousness by explaining its origin in evolutionary terms and identifying mental phenomena with brain processes, to "computerize" it by identifying mind with the supposed computational activity of the brain, and to eliminate it by denying the reality of qualia.

Recent events such as the massacres in Dunblane and Arkansas, the deaths of children in terrorist attacks, civil wars and famines, children born with AIDS, and the many abductions and murders of children - including some by children - have placed childhood death firmly in the public consciousness.

Marx is out of fashion in intellectual circles on the whole but he is increasingly seen as an astute and relevant guide to the spread of a new raw capitalism world wide.

Although African ethnicity has become a highly fertile field of enquiry in recent years, most of the research is concentrated on southern and central Africa, and has passed Ghana by. The volume also examines the formulation of the national question in Ghana today - in debates over language policy and conflicts over land and chieftaincy.

Material culture, the substance of much archaeological research, has only recently been studied as evidence of gender relations. Case studies, drawn from many different periods and areas, develop concepts and theories as diverse as the social context of production and artefact use to the construction of food as a gendered social medium.

Focusing primarily on visual forms of representation, but also including material on literary representation, this volume brings together studies as apparently disparate as the iconography of power in Mediterranean prehistory and clothing and cultural meaning in the First and Second World Wars.

This book offers an authoritative study of election observation in Africa and its relation with democratization processes. An interdisciplinary approach gives fair coverage of the historical, political and cultural issues involved in elections and election observation in Africa.

This book examines whether transplanting banks from outside can solve the problems involved in creating a well-functioning market economy, looking especially at the virtual complete takeover of East German banks by their Western counterparts after unification.

Bringing together a distinguished cast of contributors, this book provides an authoritative and definitive analysis of the theory, practice, and development impact of corruption in Africa.

Five African specialists examine Africa's five regions regarding changes in U.S.-Africa relations as a consequence of the demise of the global Cold War. The separate chapters review Africa's five regions, as well as provide prospects for U.S. relations with Africa in a climate without soviet strategic competition.

This book provides a broad, analytical study of Bangladesh's relationship with India and Pakistan between 1975 and 1990. The book reveals the complexity of the relationship between Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan and challenges the biased and stereotypical views often encountered regarding Bangladesh's foreign policy.

This collection of essays is addressed to the legacy of Enlightenment thought, with respect to eighteenth-century notions of human nature, human rights, representative democracy or the nation-state, and with regard to the barbarism, including the Holocaust, allegedly unleashed by eighteenth-century ideals of civilization.

The drug problem in South Asia is mounting. Drugs in South Asia explains why the ensuing governments in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh barely changed the remains of the British drug laws until the mid-1980s and examines the Indian resurgence in recent years in international drug trafficking.

This collection of essays was conceived as part of the centenary celebrations of the first publication in 1896 of one of the most popular collections of poetry ever written - A Shropshire Lad - a collection never out of print in a hundred years.

This volume brings together essays by specialists in different disciplines on the cultural expression of apocalypse, in particular in anglophone science fiction of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

However, in contrast to the majority of the literature which focuses on alleged Chinese abuses of human rights, the author examines the emergence and evolution of a Chinese conception of rights, paying attention to the impact of Confucianism, Republicanism, and Marxism on this conception.

Learning Policy identifies for the first time a new area of social policy. In the latest phase of Learning Policy, the New Labour government is seen as moving further toward privatizing education and training at all levels at the same time as using a regionally differentiated education and training system for social control.

Mercenaries have been employed as auxiliaries since early times, but in the post-1945 world they have operated, almost exclusively, in weak Third World countries.

This is the first book on the Arab Shi'a community, a group whose identity and relations to the rest of the Middle East cut to the heart of politics and society in the Arab and Muslim world.

One aspect that overwhelmingly defines the second half of the 20th century is the remarkable economic growth of Asia. This book offers a comprehensive view of the various factors - scientific, technological, and economic - that enabled the region to make a brilliant comeback after centuries of oppression.

Lecercle draws on the resources of pragmatics, literary theory and the philosophy of language to propose a new theory of literary, but also of face-to-face, dialogue that charts the interaction between the five participants in the fields of dialogue and/or interpretation: author, reader, text, language and encyclopaedia.

Ibsen's Drama: Right Action and Tragic Joy argues that in his late plays Ibsen struggled with, and finally repudiated the Aristotelian ideas of reality and change that held sway over the earlier part of his career, and more generally over nineteenth century drama and culture.

The first critical analysis of the Titanic as modern myth, this book focuses on the second of the two Titanics. It provides an insight into the particular culture of late Edwardian Britain and beyond this draws far greater conclusions about the complex relationship between myth, history, popular culture and society as a whole.

As Socialist states struggle to transform themselves into market economies and the United States privatizes everything from schooling to policing, the current crises in Russia and East Asia suggest that something might be amiss.

Based on a major empirical study, it is a unique glimpse into how some women, who live lives completely torn apart by poverty, violence and criminalization, are able to understand their lives in prostitution and make sense of the choices they make in their struggle to survive.

The body as a focus for power and resistance in differing welfare regimes is further explored in individual contributions on health and social care, bodily metaphors in social policy and the relationship between animal and human welfare.