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Hamilton’s industrial age is over. In the steel capital of Canada, there are no more skies lit red by foundries at sunset, no more traffic jams at shift change. Instead, an urban renaissance is taking shape. But who wins and who loses in the city’s not-too-distant future? Is it possible to lift a downtrodden, post-industrial city out of poverty in a way that benefits people across the social spectrum, not just a wealthy elite? In Shift Change, author Stephen Dale sets up “the Hammer” as a battlefield, a laboratory, a chessboard. As investors cash in on a real estate gold rush and the all-too-familiar wheels of gentrification begin to turn, there’s still a rare opportunity for both old-guard and newcomer Hamiltonians to come together and write a different story—one in which Steeltown becomes an economically diverse and inclusive urban centre for all. What plays out in these pages and at this very moment is a real-time case study that will capture the attention and the imagination of anyone interested in equitable redevelopment, housing activism, and social justice in the North American city.
McLuhan’s Children is an inside look at Greenpeace’s rise to global prominence through its savvy use of mass media imagery. From the flamboyant, guerilla-theatre approach to the emergence of environmentalism as a dominant international issue.
An examination of Khaldun’s Islamic history of the premodern world, its philosophical underpinnings, and the author himself. In his masterwork Muqaddimah, the Arab Muslim Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406), a Tunisian descendant of Andalusian scholars and officials in Seville, developed a method of evaluating historical evidence that allowed him to identify the underlying causes of events. His methodology was derived from Aristotelian notions of nature and causation, and he applied it to create a dialectical model that explained the cyclical rise and fall of North African dynasties. The Muqaddimah represents the world’s first example of structural history and historical sociology. Four centuries ...
In this remarkable 1994 work of comparative economic history, Stephen Dale studies the activities and economic significance of the Indian mercantile communities which traded in Iran, Central Asia and Russia in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The author uses Russian sources, hitherto largely ignored, to show that these merchants represented part of the hegemonic trade diaspora of the Indian world economy, thus challenging the conventional interpretation of world economic history that European merchants overwhelmed their Asian counterparts in the early modern era. The book not only demonstrates the vitality of Indian mercantile capitalism, but also offers a unique insight into the social characteristics of an Indian expatriate trading community in the Volga-Caspian port of Astrakhan.
Between 1453 and 1526 Muslims founded three major states in the Mediterranean, Iran and South Asia: respectively the Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal empires. By the early seventeenth century their descendants controlled territories that encompassed much of the Muslim world, stretching from the Balkans and North Africa to the Bay of Bengal and including a combined population of between 130 and 160 million people. This book is the first comparative study of the politics, religion, and culture of these three empires between 1300 and 1923. At the heart of the analysis is Islam, and how it impacted on the political and military structures, the economy, language, literature and religious traditions of these great empires. This original and sophisticated study provides an antidote to the modern view of Muslim societies by illustrating the complexity, humanity and vitality of these empires, empires that cannot be reduced simply to religious doctrine.
A Winnipeg Free Press Top Read of 2021 What if David Bowie really was holding the fabric of the universe together? The death of David Bowie in January 2016 was a bad start to a year that got a lot worse: war in Syria, the Zika virus, terrorist attacks in Brussels and Nice, the Brexit vote—and the election of Donald Trump. The end-of-year wraps declared 2016 “the worst … ever.” Four even more troubling years later, the question of our apocalypse had devolved into a tired social media cliché. But when COVID-19 hit, journalist and professor of public policy Andrew Potter started to wonder: what if The End isn’t one big event, but a long series of smaller ones? In On Decline, Potter s...
This book is a concise biography of Babur, who founded the Timurid-Mughal Empire of South Asia. Based primarily on his autobiography and existential verse, it chronicles the life and career of a Central Asian, Turco-Mongol Muslim who, driven from his homeland by Uzbeks in 1504, ruled Kabul for two decades before invading 'Hindustan' in 1526. It offers a revealing portrait of Babur's Perso-Islamic culture, Timurid imperial ambition and turbulent emotional life. It is, above all, a humanistic portrait of an individual, who even as he triumphed in South Asia, suffered the regretful anguish of an exile who felt himself to be a stranger in a strange land.
Several important social consequences, flowed from the aftermath of the suburban construction boom of the 1980s: the homogeneous nature of the new suburbs, full of affluent white people, the antithesis of urban cosmopolitanism; and the cost of building roads and servicing land as we push farther into the rural frontier. This schism between the suburbs and the urban core began in California, where Republicans perpetually win state elections on the strength of the suburban vote, despite well-entrenched liberal strongholds in Los Angeles and San Francisco. The burghers of suburbia are stuck on the idea of government spending as a burden on honest people, and on the image of urban dwellers as welfare cheats, overpaid bureaucrats, and members of a condescending cultural elite. And they're looking for revenge.
This English edition of the correspondence of Khwāja 'Ubayd Allāh Aḥrār, the fifteenth-century Central Asian Naqshbandī Sufi shaykh, and his associates provides surprising new insights into the sociopolitical and economic history of premodern Central Asia and the influential roles of Sufi leaders of the time. It contains the extraordinary collection of autograph letters from the Majmū'a-yi murāsalāt, a unique manuscript housed at the Institute of Oriental Studies in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, with petitions to the Timurid court at Herat. The letters cover such topics as internecine conflict, peacemaking, taxation, property and endowments, trade, migration, Islamic piety and law, material support of shaykhs and students, and relief from oppression. Three introductory chapters discuss the Central Asian Naqshbandīya, Khwāja 'Ubayd Allāh Aḥrār, the social, historical, economic and political significance of the letters, and the manuscript and its authors. With the Persian transcription and a complete facsimile of the manuscript letters reproduced at the end of the work.