Author: Robert S.G. Fletcher
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350238910
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 256
Book Description
This book presents intimate, engaging, and largely untold portraits of Western lives and livelihoods in Japanese and Chinese treaty ports, as well as in the British colonies of Hong Kong, Australia and New Zealand, during the 19th century. It does so by examining how Westerners 'chronicled' their overseas lives in personal letters, diplomatic dispatches, business records, and academic papers. By utilizing these rich but often overlooked sources, Chronicling Westerners in Nineteenth-Century East Asia presents new insights into the pace and challenges of daily life, especially in the Japanese treaty ports of Nagasaki and Yokohama but also in Shanghai and Hong Kong. In the process, the volume stresses the 'connectivities' between its subjects, as Westerners' lives intersected, and as they moved between Japanese and Chinese port cities. Contributors based in the USA, Japan, the UK, New Zealand and Switzerland reveal the various commercial, maritime, and imperial connections, linked in surprising ways to Westerners in East Asia portrayed here, which shaped colonial development in Australia and New Zealand. Through a broad investigation of Westerners recording their lives, the book re-examines wider histories of the so-called 'openings' of China and Japan in the 1850s and 1860s, as well as how Westerners sought to make sense of these events, and to narrate their place within them. Finally the volume considers how flows of people, capital, commerce, and communications not only cut across the histories of distinct treaty ports in Japan and China, but also shows their implications for empire and exchange beyond East Asia, including Australia, New Zealand, and the 19th-century maritime world.
Chronicling Westerners in Nineteenth-Century East Asia
Author: Robert S.G. Fletcher
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350238910
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 256
Book Description
This book presents intimate, engaging, and largely untold portraits of Western lives and livelihoods in Japanese and Chinese treaty ports, as well as in the British colonies of Hong Kong, Australia and New Zealand, during the 19th century. It does so by examining how Westerners 'chronicled' their overseas lives in personal letters, diplomatic dispatches, business records, and academic papers. By utilizing these rich but often overlooked sources, Chronicling Westerners in Nineteenth-Century East Asia presents new insights into the pace and challenges of daily life, especially in the Japanese treaty ports of Nagasaki and Yokohama but also in Shanghai and Hong Kong. In the process, the volume stresses the 'connectivities' between its subjects, as Westerners' lives intersected, and as they moved between Japanese and Chinese port cities. Contributors based in the USA, Japan, the UK, New Zealand and Switzerland reveal the various commercial, maritime, and imperial connections, linked in surprising ways to Westerners in East Asia portrayed here, which shaped colonial development in Australia and New Zealand. Through a broad investigation of Westerners recording their lives, the book re-examines wider histories of the so-called 'openings' of China and Japan in the 1850s and 1860s, as well as how Westerners sought to make sense of these events, and to narrate their place within them. Finally the volume considers how flows of people, capital, commerce, and communications not only cut across the histories of distinct treaty ports in Japan and China, but also shows their implications for empire and exchange beyond East Asia, including Australia, New Zealand, and the 19th-century maritime world.
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350238910
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 256
Book Description
This book presents intimate, engaging, and largely untold portraits of Western lives and livelihoods in Japanese and Chinese treaty ports, as well as in the British colonies of Hong Kong, Australia and New Zealand, during the 19th century. It does so by examining how Westerners 'chronicled' their overseas lives in personal letters, diplomatic dispatches, business records, and academic papers. By utilizing these rich but often overlooked sources, Chronicling Westerners in Nineteenth-Century East Asia presents new insights into the pace and challenges of daily life, especially in the Japanese treaty ports of Nagasaki and Yokohama but also in Shanghai and Hong Kong. In the process, the volume stresses the 'connectivities' between its subjects, as Westerners' lives intersected, and as they moved between Japanese and Chinese port cities. Contributors based in the USA, Japan, the UK, New Zealand and Switzerland reveal the various commercial, maritime, and imperial connections, linked in surprising ways to Westerners in East Asia portrayed here, which shaped colonial development in Australia and New Zealand. Through a broad investigation of Westerners recording their lives, the book re-examines wider histories of the so-called 'openings' of China and Japan in the 1850s and 1860s, as well as how Westerners sought to make sense of these events, and to narrate their place within them. Finally the volume considers how flows of people, capital, commerce, and communications not only cut across the histories of distinct treaty ports in Japan and China, but also shows their implications for empire and exchange beyond East Asia, including Australia, New Zealand, and the 19th-century maritime world.
Contesting Memorial Spaces of Japan's Empire
Author: Edward Boyle
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350324612
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 225
Book Description
Ongoing arguments over how histories are honoured – as evidenced by the conflict between South Korea and Japan over the opening of Tokyo's Heritage Information Centre in June 2020 – reveal the extent to which heritage processes enable states to assert legitimacy and power on a global stage. Here, Contesting Memorial Spaces of Japan's Empire shines a timely spotlight on the complicated histories and disputed legacies of various sites associated with Japan's empire in Asia and the Pacific. Bringing together a team of international scholars, this transnational study sees contested memorial spaces as windows for us to explore how borders are created, moved and altered in everyday life. From the Asan Bay Overlook Memorial Wall in Guam and the Puppet Emperor Palace in China to Japan's Ainu Museum and the Cowra War Cemetery in Australia, the diverse range of case studies examined here foreground the complex relationship Japan and its neighbours have with their imperial past and reveal how these relations stand at the intersection of individual actions, societal choices and memory collectives. In doing so, this innovative collection of essays bridges history, geography and heritage studies to provide an invaluable new approach to the study of imperial conflict and memory politics in modern Japan.
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350324612
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 225
Book Description
Ongoing arguments over how histories are honoured – as evidenced by the conflict between South Korea and Japan over the opening of Tokyo's Heritage Information Centre in June 2020 – reveal the extent to which heritage processes enable states to assert legitimacy and power on a global stage. Here, Contesting Memorial Spaces of Japan's Empire shines a timely spotlight on the complicated histories and disputed legacies of various sites associated with Japan's empire in Asia and the Pacific. Bringing together a team of international scholars, this transnational study sees contested memorial spaces as windows for us to explore how borders are created, moved and altered in everyday life. From the Asan Bay Overlook Memorial Wall in Guam and the Puppet Emperor Palace in China to Japan's Ainu Museum and the Cowra War Cemetery in Australia, the diverse range of case studies examined here foreground the complex relationship Japan and its neighbours have with their imperial past and reveal how these relations stand at the intersection of individual actions, societal choices and memory collectives. In doing so, this innovative collection of essays bridges history, geography and heritage studies to provide an invaluable new approach to the study of imperial conflict and memory politics in modern Japan.
The Tale of Genji through Contemporary Manga
Author: Lynne K. Miyake
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350424943
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 261
Book Description
This groundbreaking study examines the unlikely merger of two Japanese cultural phenomena, an 11th-century aristocratic text and contemporary manga comics. It explores the ways in which the manga versions of The Tale of Genji use gender, sexuality, and desire to challenge perceptions of reading and readership, morality and ethics, and what is translatable from one culture to another. Lynne K. Miyake shows that, through their girls, ladies, Boy Love, boys and young men, and informational comics remediations of the tale, the manga Genjis visually, narratively, and affectively rework male and female gazes; Miyake reveals how they gently inject humor, eroticize, gender flip, queer, and simultaneously re-inscribe and challenge heteronormative gender norms. The first full-length study of Genji manga, this book analyses these adaptations within manga studies and the historical and cultural moments that fashioned and sustained them. It also interrogates the circumscribed, in-group aristocratic society and the consumer and production practices of the Heian society that come full circle in the manga versions. The Tale of Genji through Contemporary Manga utilizes western queer, feminist, sexuality and gender theory and Japanese cultural practices to illuminate the ways in which the Genji tale redeploys itself. Yet it also provides much needed context and explanation regarding the charges of appropriation of prepubescent (fe)male and gay bodies and the utilization of (sexual) violence mounted against Genji manga-and manga and anime in general once they went global.
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350424943
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 261
Book Description
This groundbreaking study examines the unlikely merger of two Japanese cultural phenomena, an 11th-century aristocratic text and contemporary manga comics. It explores the ways in which the manga versions of The Tale of Genji use gender, sexuality, and desire to challenge perceptions of reading and readership, morality and ethics, and what is translatable from one culture to another. Lynne K. Miyake shows that, through their girls, ladies, Boy Love, boys and young men, and informational comics remediations of the tale, the manga Genjis visually, narratively, and affectively rework male and female gazes; Miyake reveals how they gently inject humor, eroticize, gender flip, queer, and simultaneously re-inscribe and challenge heteronormative gender norms. The first full-length study of Genji manga, this book analyses these adaptations within manga studies and the historical and cultural moments that fashioned and sustained them. It also interrogates the circumscribed, in-group aristocratic society and the consumer and production practices of the Heian society that come full circle in the manga versions. The Tale of Genji through Contemporary Manga utilizes western queer, feminist, sexuality and gender theory and Japanese cultural practices to illuminate the ways in which the Genji tale redeploys itself. Yet it also provides much needed context and explanation regarding the charges of appropriation of prepubescent (fe)male and gay bodies and the utilization of (sexual) violence mounted against Genji manga-and manga and anime in general once they went global.
The Translocal Island of Okinawa
Author: Shinnosuke Takahashi
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 135041154X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 193
Book Description
The Translocal Island of Okinawa reveals the underrepresented memories, visions and actions that are involved in the making of Okinawan resistance against its subordinated status under the US-Japan security system beyond the narrowly defined political, cultural and geographical borders of locality. As Okinawa's base politics is a problem deeply rooted in the context of East Asia, so is the history of the people's protest movement. The issue examined in this book is the arbitrary distinction of scale between 'local', which tends to be employed for a particular territory demarcated by a cohesive culture, and 'regional', a larger area that consists of myriad localities. Locality, Shinnosuke Takahashi here argues, is neither self-evident, fixed nor homogenous but is established through historical processes that involve interaction, conflict and negotiation of individuals and communities across territorial and cultural boundaries. This book reveals the novel concept of Okinawa as a translocal island which offers a way to understand locality in the context of Okinawan activism as a product of multiple cultural and human flows, as opposed to the conventional way of framing the local community as fixed, internally cohesive and rigidly bordered. It makes an exciting contribution to the field of modern Japanese and East Asian studies by stimulating discussions on the richness and scale of local civic activism that is increasingly becoming a key political feature of the East Asian region.
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 135041154X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 193
Book Description
The Translocal Island of Okinawa reveals the underrepresented memories, visions and actions that are involved in the making of Okinawan resistance against its subordinated status under the US-Japan security system beyond the narrowly defined political, cultural and geographical borders of locality. As Okinawa's base politics is a problem deeply rooted in the context of East Asia, so is the history of the people's protest movement. The issue examined in this book is the arbitrary distinction of scale between 'local', which tends to be employed for a particular territory demarcated by a cohesive culture, and 'regional', a larger area that consists of myriad localities. Locality, Shinnosuke Takahashi here argues, is neither self-evident, fixed nor homogenous but is established through historical processes that involve interaction, conflict and negotiation of individuals and communities across territorial and cultural boundaries. This book reveals the novel concept of Okinawa as a translocal island which offers a way to understand locality in the context of Okinawan activism as a product of multiple cultural and human flows, as opposed to the conventional way of framing the local community as fixed, internally cohesive and rigidly bordered. It makes an exciting contribution to the field of modern Japanese and East Asian studies by stimulating discussions on the richness and scale of local civic activism that is increasingly becoming a key political feature of the East Asian region.
"Travel, Collecting, and Museums of Asian Art in Nineteenth-Century Paris "
Author: Ting Chang
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351538454
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 210
Book Description
Travel, Collecting, and Museums of Asian Art in Nineteenth-Century Paris examines a history of contact between modern Europe and East Asia through three collectors: Henri Cernuschi, Emile Guimet, and Edmond de Goncourt. Drawing on a wealth of material including European travelogues of the East and Asian reports of the West, Ting Chang explores the politics of mobility and cross-cultural encounter in the nineteenth century. This book takes a new approach to museum studies and institutional critique by highlighting what is missing from the existing scholarship -- the foreign labors, social relations, and somatic experiences of travel that are constitutive of museums yet left out of their histories. The author explores how global trade and monetary theory shaped Cernuschi's collection of archaic Chinese bronze. Exchange systems, both material and immaterial, determined Guimet's museum of religious objects and Goncourt's private collection of Asian art. Bronze, porcelain, and prints articulated the shifting relations and frameworks of understanding between France, Japan, and China in a time of profound transformation. Travel, Collecting, and Museums of Asian Art in Nineteenth-Century Paris thus looks at what Asian art was imagined to do for Europe. This book will be of interest to scholars and students interested in art history, travel imagery, museum studies, cross-cultural encounters, and modern transnational histories.
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351538454
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 210
Book Description
Travel, Collecting, and Museums of Asian Art in Nineteenth-Century Paris examines a history of contact between modern Europe and East Asia through three collectors: Henri Cernuschi, Emile Guimet, and Edmond de Goncourt. Drawing on a wealth of material including European travelogues of the East and Asian reports of the West, Ting Chang explores the politics of mobility and cross-cultural encounter in the nineteenth century. This book takes a new approach to museum studies and institutional critique by highlighting what is missing from the existing scholarship -- the foreign labors, social relations, and somatic experiences of travel that are constitutive of museums yet left out of their histories. The author explores how global trade and monetary theory shaped Cernuschi's collection of archaic Chinese bronze. Exchange systems, both material and immaterial, determined Guimet's museum of religious objects and Goncourt's private collection of Asian art. Bronze, porcelain, and prints articulated the shifting relations and frameworks of understanding between France, Japan, and China in a time of profound transformation. Travel, Collecting, and Museums of Asian Art in Nineteenth-Century Paris thus looks at what Asian art was imagined to do for Europe. This book will be of interest to scholars and students interested in art history, travel imagery, museum studies, cross-cultural encounters, and modern transnational histories.
Green with Milk and Sugar
Author: Robert Hellyer
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231552947
Category : Cooking
Languages : en
Pages : 187
Book Description
Today, Americans are some of the world’s biggest consumers of black teas; in Japan, green tea, especially sencha, is preferred. These national partialities, Robert Hellyer reveals, are deeply entwined. Tracing the transpacific tea trade from the eighteenth century onward, Green with Milk and Sugar shows how interconnections between Japan and the United States have influenced the daily habits of people in both countries. Hellyer explores the forgotten American penchant for Japanese green tea and how it shaped Japanese tastes. In the nineteenth century, Americans favored green teas, which were imported from China until Japan developed an export industry centered on the United States. The influx of Japanese imports democratized green tea: Americans of all classes, particularly Midwesterners, made it their daily beverage—which they drank hot, often with milk and sugar. In the 1920s, socioeconomic trends and racial prejudices pushed Americans toward black teas from Ceylon and India. Facing a glut, Japanese merchants aggressively marketed sencha on their home and imperial markets, transforming it into an icon of Japanese culture. Featuring lively stories of the people involved in the tea trade—including samurai turned tea farmers and Hellyer’s own ancestors—Green with Milk and Sugar offers not only a social and commodity history of tea in the United States and Japan but also new insights into how national customs have profound if often hidden international dimensions.
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231552947
Category : Cooking
Languages : en
Pages : 187
Book Description
Today, Americans are some of the world’s biggest consumers of black teas; in Japan, green tea, especially sencha, is preferred. These national partialities, Robert Hellyer reveals, are deeply entwined. Tracing the transpacific tea trade from the eighteenth century onward, Green with Milk and Sugar shows how interconnections between Japan and the United States have influenced the daily habits of people in both countries. Hellyer explores the forgotten American penchant for Japanese green tea and how it shaped Japanese tastes. In the nineteenth century, Americans favored green teas, which were imported from China until Japan developed an export industry centered on the United States. The influx of Japanese imports democratized green tea: Americans of all classes, particularly Midwesterners, made it their daily beverage—which they drank hot, often with milk and sugar. In the 1920s, socioeconomic trends and racial prejudices pushed Americans toward black teas from Ceylon and India. Facing a glut, Japanese merchants aggressively marketed sencha on their home and imperial markets, transforming it into an icon of Japanese culture. Featuring lively stories of the people involved in the tea trade—including samurai turned tea farmers and Hellyer’s own ancestors—Green with Milk and Sugar offers not only a social and commodity history of tea in the United States and Japan but also new insights into how national customs have profound if often hidden international dimensions.
The Aftermath of Partition in South Asia
Author: Gyanesh Kudaisya
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134440480
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 343
Book Description
The Aftermath of Partition in South Asia draws upon new theoretical insights and fresh bodies of data to historically reappraise partition in the light of its long aftermath.
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134440480
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 343
Book Description
The Aftermath of Partition in South Asia draws upon new theoretical insights and fresh bodies of data to historically reappraise partition in the light of its long aftermath.
Tracing China
Author: Helen F. Siu
Publisher: Hong Kong University Press
ISBN: 9888083732
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 527
Book Description
Tracing China’s journey began from exploring rural revolution and reconstitutions of community in South China. Spanning decades of rural-urban divide, it finally uncovers China’s global reach and Hong Kong’s cross-border dynamics. Helen Siu traverses physical and cultural landscapes to examine political tumults transforming into everyday lives, and fathom the depths of human drama amid China’s frenetic momentum toward modernity. Highlighting complicity, Siu portrays how villagers, urbanites, cadres, entrepreneurs, and intellectuals—laden with historical baggage—venture forward. But have they victimized themselves in the process? This essay collection, informed by critical social theories and shaped by careful scrutiny of fieldwork and archival texts, is woven by key historical/anthropological themes—culture, history, power, place-making, and identity formation. Siu stresses process and contingency and argues that culture and society are constructed through human actions with nuanced meanings, moral imagination, and contested interests. Challenging the notion that social/political changes are mere linear historical progressions, she traces layers of the past in present realities. “Helen Siu is one of the world’s leading specialists on Chinese rural and urban society. Her essays, collected here, cover a wide range of topics of interest to anthropologists, sociologists, geographers, economists, and political scientists. Siu focuses on the ‘underside’ of social life in South China, a quality so often missing in the work of others. She writes with great skill and empathy.” —James L. Watson, Fairbank Professor of Chinese Society and Professor of Anthropology, Emeritus, Harvard University “No one has woven the threads of ethnography, social structure, and cultural performance so brilliantly together as Helen Siu has in Tracing China. This rich tapestry of her finest scholarship illuminates how culture, power, and history can be deployed to yield wholly original and convincing understandings of southern China.” —James C. Scott, Sterling Professor of Political Science and Anthropology, Yale University
Publisher: Hong Kong University Press
ISBN: 9888083732
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 527
Book Description
Tracing China’s journey began from exploring rural revolution and reconstitutions of community in South China. Spanning decades of rural-urban divide, it finally uncovers China’s global reach and Hong Kong’s cross-border dynamics. Helen Siu traverses physical and cultural landscapes to examine political tumults transforming into everyday lives, and fathom the depths of human drama amid China’s frenetic momentum toward modernity. Highlighting complicity, Siu portrays how villagers, urbanites, cadres, entrepreneurs, and intellectuals—laden with historical baggage—venture forward. But have they victimized themselves in the process? This essay collection, informed by critical social theories and shaped by careful scrutiny of fieldwork and archival texts, is woven by key historical/anthropological themes—culture, history, power, place-making, and identity formation. Siu stresses process and contingency and argues that culture and society are constructed through human actions with nuanced meanings, moral imagination, and contested interests. Challenging the notion that social/political changes are mere linear historical progressions, she traces layers of the past in present realities. “Helen Siu is one of the world’s leading specialists on Chinese rural and urban society. Her essays, collected here, cover a wide range of topics of interest to anthropologists, sociologists, geographers, economists, and political scientists. Siu focuses on the ‘underside’ of social life in South China, a quality so often missing in the work of others. She writes with great skill and empathy.” —James L. Watson, Fairbank Professor of Chinese Society and Professor of Anthropology, Emeritus, Harvard University “No one has woven the threads of ethnography, social structure, and cultural performance so brilliantly together as Helen Siu has in Tracing China. This rich tapestry of her finest scholarship illuminates how culture, power, and history can be deployed to yield wholly original and convincing understandings of southern China.” —James C. Scott, Sterling Professor of Political Science and Anthropology, Yale University
We Are Not Garbage!
Author: Miki Hasegawa
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 113550783X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 230
Book Description
This book offers a full history of a homeless movement in Tokyo that lasted nearly a decade. It shows how homeless people and their external supporters in the city combined their scarce resources to generate and sustain the movement. The study advocates a more nuanced analysis of movement gains to appreciate how poor people can benefit by acting collectively. It also draws attention to potential difficulties faced by lower-stratum movements aided by external allies. In particular, the study highlights how actions of the state can undermine the relations between aggrieved allies in such a way as to limit gains. The book is the first in English to detail homeless mobilization in Japan. It also addresses the origins of increased homelessness and development of homelessness policy in the country. Besides homelessness, it covers a number of current social issues, including economic globalization, social exclusion, and politics over space.
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 113550783X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 230
Book Description
This book offers a full history of a homeless movement in Tokyo that lasted nearly a decade. It shows how homeless people and their external supporters in the city combined their scarce resources to generate and sustain the movement. The study advocates a more nuanced analysis of movement gains to appreciate how poor people can benefit by acting collectively. It also draws attention to potential difficulties faced by lower-stratum movements aided by external allies. In particular, the study highlights how actions of the state can undermine the relations between aggrieved allies in such a way as to limit gains. The book is the first in English to detail homeless mobilization in Japan. It also addresses the origins of increased homelessness and development of homelessness policy in the country. Besides homelessness, it covers a number of current social issues, including economic globalization, social exclusion, and politics over space.
Handbook of Ancient Afro-Eurasian Economies
Author: Sitta von Reden
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110604930
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 1131
Book Description
The second volume of the Handbook describes different extractive economies in the world regions that have been outlined in the first volume. A wide range of economic actors – from kings and armies to cities and producers – are discussed within different imperial settings as well as the tools, which enabled and constrained economic outcomes. A central focus are nodes of consumption that are visible in the archaeological and textual records of royal capitals, cities, religious centers, and armies that were stationed, in some cases permanently, in imperial frontier zones. Complementary to the multipolar concentrations of consumption are the fiscal-tributary structures of the empires vis-à-vis other institutions that had the capacity to extract, mobilize, and concentrate resources and wealth. Larger volumes of state-issued coinage in various metals show the new role of coinage in taxation, local economic activities, and social practices, even where textual evidence is absent. Given the overwhelming importance of agriculture, the volume also analyses forms of agrarian development, especially around cities and in imperial frontier zones. Special consideration is given to road- and water-management systems for which there is now sufficient archaeological and documentary evidence to enable cross-disciplinary comparative research.
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110604930
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 1131
Book Description
The second volume of the Handbook describes different extractive economies in the world regions that have been outlined in the first volume. A wide range of economic actors – from kings and armies to cities and producers – are discussed within different imperial settings as well as the tools, which enabled and constrained economic outcomes. A central focus are nodes of consumption that are visible in the archaeological and textual records of royal capitals, cities, religious centers, and armies that were stationed, in some cases permanently, in imperial frontier zones. Complementary to the multipolar concentrations of consumption are the fiscal-tributary structures of the empires vis-à-vis other institutions that had the capacity to extract, mobilize, and concentrate resources and wealth. Larger volumes of state-issued coinage in various metals show the new role of coinage in taxation, local economic activities, and social practices, even where textual evidence is absent. Given the overwhelming importance of agriculture, the volume also analyses forms of agrarian development, especially around cities and in imperial frontier zones. Special consideration is given to road- and water-management systems for which there is now sufficient archaeological and documentary evidence to enable cross-disciplinary comparative research.