The Politics Of Locality

First Published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

During the mid-1990s, Taiwan witnessed a remarkable proliferation of historical writings and cultural movements pertaining to 'the local'. 'Place (difang)' and 'community (shequ)' became two ubiquitous terms in the lexicon of being Taiwanese. This book is a critical examination of the socio-historical condition in which the discourse of local diversity emerged and gradually permeated Taiwan's public culture. Interweaving ethnographic sensibility and theoretical insights across disciplines, including anthropology, cultural studies and cultural geography the study elucidates the complex relationships between localism, nationalism and globalism. Not only is it a rare type of ethnography in Taiwan studies, this book also enriches our understanding of the increasingly significant field of East Asia (post)modernity.

The past ten years have seen local government in the UK facing two major challenges: to survive in the face of Thatcher government hostility, and to adapt to enormously powerful forces of economic restructuring which have also been encouraged by government policies. The key aspects of these changing fortunes of British towns explored in this important new book is the ability of individual localities to exercise any control over their own growth and decline. Place, Policy and Politics examines local political initiatives seeking to influence economic and social development in seven sharply contrasting localities, ranging from the outer council estates of Merseyside to the boom towns of Cheltenham and Swindon. Throughout their analysis, the contributors, drawn from a wide range of social science disciplines, address the vital questions in the debate over local policy initiatives, including: * To what extent are localities able to harness trends in the national and international economy to provide jobs and a better standard of living for their inhabitants? * Why do local authorities vary in their capacity to initiate economic policy? * To what extent do national urban and other policies inhibit or encourage their efforts? * How might central government modify its policies to facilitate the prospering of localities?

With the steady growth of interest in the history of India under the British, interpretations have emerged, and they may sharply alter much of our thinking about Indian nationalism and British Imperialism. Some of these historical revisions, and the conclusions which may flow from them, are illustrated by the essays in this book. All of them grapple with questions of Indian political organization in different parts of the British Raj. They enquire how these organizations worked at different level; in the towns and in the countryside, in the provinces and in the subcontinent itself. They examine how these kinds of politics came to be bonded together into what were called 'nationalist' movements. They suggest that the interplay between these movements and British Imperialism was very much more ambiguous than has been commonly supposed. All these essays are preliminary announcements of findings which will later appear in longer versions.

This collection examines political communication in early modern Britain. Leading historians of the period scrutinise relations between centre and locality and how the state interacted with its citizens. They place communication at the heart of both political and social history to provide an impetus for further scholarship.

This book inquires what is meant when we say "local" and what "local" means in the Japanese context. Through the window of locality, it enhances an understanding of broader political and socio-economic shifts in Japan. This includes demographic change, electoral and administrative reform, rural decline and revitalization, welfare reform, as well as the growing metabolic rift in energy and food production. Chapters throughout this edited volume discuss the different and often contested ways in which locality in Japan has been reconstituted, from historical and contemporary instances of administrative restructuring, to more subtle social processes of making – and unmaking – local places. Contributions from multiple disciplinary perspectives are included to investigate the tensions between overlapping and often incongruent dimensions of locality. Framed by a theoretical discussion of socio-spatial thinking, such issues surrounding the construction and renegotiation of local places are not only relevant for Japan specialists, but also connected with topical scholarly debates further afield. Accordingly, Rethinking Locality in Japan will appeal to students and scholars from Japanese studies and human geography to anthropology, history, sociology and political science.

Locality and Belonging provides an international overview of the relationship between identity and territory with case studies from Indonesia, Zanzibar, Argentina, South Africa and the UK.