The Power And Pains Of Polysemy Maritime Trade Averages And Institutional Development In The Low Countries 15th 16th Centuries

This book offers a study of so-called ‘Maritime Averages’, a variety of risk management instruments used in maritime trade, in the Low Countries, showing how Averages played a major role in the institutional development of the Low Countries.

This book offers a study of so-called 'Maritime Averages', a variety of risk management instruments used in maritime trade, in the Low Countries, showing how Averages played a major role in the institutional development of the Low Countries.

The articles collected in this volume are examples of the kind of research that can be done with the online database Sound Toll Registers Online (STRO). They show how STRO boosts the writing of the history of European maritime transport and trade, and how its use contributes to our knowledge of that history.

By looking at Dutch and Portuguese systems of settlement and trade in Western Africa, this book sheds new light on the formation of Dutch and Portuguese imperial frames, forms of commercial organisation and their role on the seventeenth-century-Atlantic.

Statistical Rethinking: A Bayesian Course with Examples in R and Stan builds readers’ knowledge of and confidence in statistical modeling. Reflecting the need for even minor programming in today’s model-based statistics, the book pushes readers to perform step-by-step calculations that are usually automated. This unique computational approach ensures that readers understand enough of the details to make reasonable choices and interpretations in their own modeling work. The text presents generalized linear multilevel models from a Bayesian perspective, relying on a simple logical interpretation of Bayesian probability and maximum entropy. It covers from the basics of regression to multilevel models. The author also discusses measurement error, missing data, and Gaussian process models for spatial and network autocorrelation. By using complete R code examples throughout, this book provides a practical foundation for performing statistical inference. Designed for both PhD students and seasoned professionals in the natural and social sciences, it prepares them for more advanced or specialized statistical modeling. Web Resource The book is accompanied by an R package (rethinking) that is available on the author’s website and GitHub. The two core functions (map and map2stan) of this package allow a variety of statistical models to be constructed from standard model formulas.

Corruption as an Empty Signifier critically explores the ways in which corruption in Africa has been equated with African politics and political order, and offers a novel approach to understanding corruption as a potentially emancipatory discourse of political transformation.

The Millennium Dome, Braveheart and Rolls Royce cars. How do cultural icons reproduce and transform a sense of national identity? How does national identity vary across time and space, how is it contested, and what has been the impact of globalization upon national identity and culture?This book examines how national identity is represented, performed, spatialized and materialized through popular culture and in everyday life. National identity is revealed to be inherent in the things we often take for granted - from landscapes and eating habits, to tourism, cinema and music. Our specific experience of car ownership and motoring can enhance a sense of belonging, whilst Hollywood blockbusters and national exhibitions provide contexts for the ongoing, and often contested, process of national identity formation. These and a wealth of other cultural forms and practices are explored, with examples drawn from Scotland, the UK as a whole, India and Mauritius. This book addresses the considerable neglect of popular cultures in recent studies of nationalism and contributes to debates on the relationship between ‘high' and ‘low' culture.

What is the nature of the modern state? How did it come into being and what are the characteristics of this distinctive field of power that has come to play such a central role in the shaping of all spheres of social, political and economic life? In this major work the great sociologist Pierre Bourdieu addresses these fundamental questions. Modifying Max Weber’s famous definition, Bourdieu defines the state in terms of the monopoly of legitimate physical and symbolic violence, where the monopoly of symbolic violence is the condition for the possession and exercise of physical violence. The state can be reduced neither to an apparatus of power in the service of dominant groups nor to a neutral site where conflicting interests are played out: rather, it constitutes the form of collective belief that structures the whole of social life. The ‘collective fiction’ of the state Ð a fiction with very real effects - is at the same time the product of all struggles between different interests, what is at stake in these struggles, and their very foundation. While the question of the state runs through the whole of Bourdieu’s work, it was never the subject of a book designed to offer a unified theory. The lecture course presented here, to which Bourdieu devoted three years of his teaching at the Collège de France, fills this gap and provides the key that brings together the whole of his research in this field. This text also shows ‘another Bourdieu’, both more concrete and more pedagogic in that he presents his thinking in the process of its development. While revealing the illusions of ‘state thought’ designed to maintain belief in government being oriented in principle to the common good, he shows himself equally critical of an ‘anti-institutional mood’ that is all too ready to reduce the construction of the bureaucratic apparatus to the function of maintaining social order. At a time when financial crisis is facilitating the hasty dismantling of public services, with little regard for any notion of popular sovereignty, this book offers the critical instruments needed for a more lucid understanding of the wellsprings of domination.