In his study of Canada, John A. Stovel examines the changes in that country’s balance of payments and balance of trade from confederation to the present day, including as part of his examination historical, statistical, and theoretical points of view. The author also reexamines critically—and finds himself in sharp disagreement with—Jacob Viner’s classic in the field, Canada’s Balance of International Indebtedness, 1900-1913, which has long been considered the definitive analysis of the subject.
Developing in Part I an eclectic theory of international balance of payments, and in Part II concentrating on the Canadian balance of trade and balance of payments in relation to economic developments preceding World War I, Stovel carefully prepares the foundation for a critique of Viner’s analysis of the period 1900-1913. Discussing the inadequacy of the Mill-Taussig theory and its empirical verification, and observing the extent to which the newer theoretical developments have afforded increased understanding, Stovel criticizes Viner’s statistics and the use to which they were put. He delineates with telling clarity the mutual interaction of many elements in cyclical growth development, as opposed to the oversimplified and inadequate causal links of the earlier theory.
In addition to the wealth of analysis of the earlier period, the author investigates the interwar period, with the postwar boom and the depression of the thirties, presenting a careful analysis of the structural changes in the balance of payments during this period as well as indicating the change in Canada’s relation to the United States and Great Britain. The concluding section of the book deals with the period following World War II, and the author indicates the possible lessons to be learned from Canada’s experiences and the improvements in government policy that have taken place, especially with respect to exchange rates.
Discover the Far North hand-in-hand with two leading authorities on the Arctic.
This travel guide offers a unique eight-day tour of the Canadian Arctic, starting at Iqaluit near the head of Frobisher Bay (2,000 kilometers north of Ottawa), flying across the line of the Arctic Circle to Resolute, and onward to Ward Hunt Island, the northernmost airstrip in North America. Whether you make the journey in person or as an armchair traveler, this eye-opening book will tell you just what makes this region so extraordinary. Stager and Swain comment on everything that's likely to catch your attention from the air, on the ground, or in the frigid waters--from the lay of the land to the cost of the food, from frost polygons to sea smoke, from narwhals to snow geese, from kayaks to icebreakers, from soapstone sculptures to satellite dishes.
Canada North: Journey to the High Arctic makes the best of traveling companions: compact, informed, and lively. You'll want to read and reread it as you plan the journey of a lifetime.
Including essays by anglophone, francophone, and First Nations writers, the reader is divided into three parts, the first of which features essays by scholars who helped set the agenda for cultural and social analysis in Canada and remain important to contemporary intellectual formations: Harold Innis, Marshall McLuhan, and Anthony Wilden in communications theory; Northrop Frye in literary studies; George Grant and Harold Innis in a left-nationalist tradition of critical political economy; Fernand Dumont and Paul-Émile Borduas in Quebecois national and political culture; and Harold Cardinal in native studies.
The volume’s second section showcases work in which contemporary authors address Canada’s problematic and incomplete nationalism; race, difference, and multiculturalism; and modernity and contemporary culture. The final section includes excerpts from federal policy documents that are especially important to Canadians’ conceptions of their social, political, and cultural circumstances. The reader opens with a foreword by Fredric Jameson and concludes with an afterword in which the Quebecois scholar Yves Laberge explores the differences between English-Canadian cultural studies and the prevailing forms of cultural analysis in francophone Canada.
Contributors. Ian Angus, Himani Bannerji, Jody Berland, Paul-Émile Borduas, Harold Cardinal, Maurice Charland, Stephen Crocker, Ioan Davies, Fernand Dumont, Kristina Fagan, Gail Faurschou, Len Findlay, Northrop Frye, George Grant, Rick Gruneau, Harold Innis, Fredric Jameson, Yves Laberge, Jocelyn Létourneau, Eva Mackey, Lee Maracle, Marshall McLuhan, Katharyne Mitchell, Sourayan Mookerjea, Kevin Pask, Rob Shields, Will Straw, Imre Szeman, Serra Tinic, David Whitson, Tony Wilden
The most comprehensive history of Canadian military intelligence and its influence on key military operations
Canadian intelligence has become increasingly central to the operations of the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF). Canadian Military Intelligence: Operations and Evolution from the October Crisis to the War in Afghanistan is the first comprehensive history that examines the impact of tactical, operational, and strategic intelligence on the Canadian military.
Drawing upon a wide range of original documents and interviews with participants in specific operations, author David A. Charters provides an inside perspective on the development of military intelligence since the Second World War. He shows how intelligence influenced key military operations, from domestic internal security to peacekeeping efforts to high-intensity air campaigns—including the October Crisis of 1970, the Oka Crisis, the Gulf War, peacekeeping and enforcement operations in the Balkans, and the war in Afghanistan. He describes how decades of experience, innovation, and increasingly close cooperation with its Five Eyes and NATO allies allowed Canada’s military intelligence to punch above its weight. Its tactical effectiveness and ability to overcome challenges reshaped the outlook of military commanders, and intelligence emerged from the margins to become a central feature of military and defense operations.
Canadian Military Intelligence offers lessons from the past and critical implications for future intelligence support with the creation of the Canadian Forces Intelligence Command. This book will be essential to both intelligence history and military history readers and collections.
Prehistoric farmers in Mexico invented irrigation, developed it into a science, and used it widely. Indeed, many of the canal systems still in use in Mexico today were originally begun well before the discovery of the New World. In this comprehensive study, William E. Doolittle synthesizes and extensively analyzes all that is currently known about the development and use of irrigation technology in prehistoric Mexico from about 1200 B.C. until the Spanish conquest in the sixteenth century A.D.
Unlike authors of previous studies who have focused on the political, economic, and social implications of irrigation, Doolittle considers it in a developmental context. He examines virtually all the known systems, from small canals that diverted runoff from ephemeral mountain streams to elaborate networks that involved numerous large canals to irrigate broad valley floors with water from perennial rivers. Throughout the discussion, he gives special emphasis to the technological elaborations that distinguish each system from its predecessors. He also traces the spread of canal technology into and through different ecological settings.
This research substantially clarifies the relationship between irrigation technology in Mexico and the American Southwest and argues persuasively that much of the technology that has been attributed to the Spaniards was actually developed in Mexico by indigenous people. These findings will be important not only for archaeologists working in this area but also for geographers, historians, and engineers interested in agriculture, technology, and arid lands.
The Canals of Mars is a memoir that explores and ponders "weakness," which in Gary Fincke's family was the catch-all term for every possible human flaw-physical, psychological, or spiritual. Fincke grew up near Pittsburgh during the 1950s and 1960s, raised by blue-collar parents for whom the problems that beset people-from alcoholism to nearsightedness to asthma to fear of heights-were nothing but weaknesses.
In a highly engaging style, Fincke meditates on the disappointments he suffered-in his body, his mind, his work-because he was convinced that he had to be "perfect." Anything less than perfection was weakness and no one, he understood from an early age, wants to be weak.
Six of the chapters in the book have been cited in Best American Essays. The chapter that provides the book's title, The Canals of Mars, won a Pushcart Prize and was included in The Pushcart Book of Essays: The Best Essays from a Quarter Century of the Pushcart Prize.
Cancer Activism explores the interplay between advocacy, the media, and public perception through an analysis of breast cancer and prostate cancer activist groups over a nearly twenty-year period. Despite both diseases having nearly identical mortality and morbidity rates, Karen M. Kedrowski and Marilyn Stine Sarow present evidence from more than 4,200 news articles to show that the different groups have had markedly different impacts. They trace the rise of each movement from its beginning and explore how discussions about the diseases appeared on media, public, and government agendas. In an important exception to the feminist tenet that women as a group hold less power than men, Kedrowski and Sarow demonstrate that the breast cancer movement is not only larger and better organized than the prostate cancer movement, it is also far more successful at shaping media coverage, public opinion, and government policy.
The Cancer Stage of Capitalism is a modern classic of critical philosophy and political economy, renowned for its depth and comprehensive research. It provides a step by step diagnosis of the continuing economic collapse in the US and Europe and has had an enormous influence on new visions of economic alternatives.
John McMurtry argues that our world disorder of unending crises is the predictable result of a cancerous economic system multiplying out of all control and destroying ecological, social and organic life - a process he describes as 'global ecogenocide'. In this updated edition he explains the ‘social immune response’ required to fight the ‘macro cancer’, something which has already been shown in developments such as the Occupy movement and the democratic social transformation of Latin America.
In an official global culture increasingly destructive of life, this book shows the necessity and possibility of building a sustainable society based on a universal commitment to life and nature.
An innovative theory proposes a new therapeutic strategy to break the stalemate in the war on cancer. It is called cancer stem cell (CSC) theory, and Lucie Laplane offers a comprehensive analysis, based on an original interdisciplinary approach that combines biology, biomedical history, and philosophy.
Rather than treat cancer by aggressively trying to eliminate all cancerous cells—with harmful side effects for patients—CSC theory suggests the possibility of targeting the CSCs, a small fraction of cells that lie at the root of cancers. CSCs are cancer cells that also have the defining properties of stem cells—the abilities to self-renew and to differentiate. According to this theory, only CSCs and no other cancer cells can induce tumor formation.
To date, researchers have not agreed on the defining feature of CSCs—their stemness. Drawing from a philosophical perspective, Laplane shows that there are four possible ways to understand this property: stemness can be categorical (an intrinsic property of stem cells), dispositional (an intrinsic property whose expression depends on external stimuli), relational (an extrinsic property determined by a cell’s relationship with the microenvironment), or systemic (an extrinsic property controlled at the system level). Our ability to cure cancers may well depend upon determining how these definitions apply to different types of cancers.
In Candidates, Congress, and the American Democracy Linda L. Fowler provides a wide-ranging examination of candidacy as a source of both stability and change in U.S. politics. An expert on political candidates, she brings a novel perspective to the topic by emphasizing that candidates are necessary instruments for popular control of government.
Fowler maintains that the ambitions of individual candidates are essential to the functioning of the nation's constitutional system and are important factors in its political history. She traces the influence of candidates in fostering electoral competition, promoting the representation of such newly mobilized groups of citizens as women and ethnic minorities, and transforming political institutions and parties. Despite the importance of candidacy, the institution is poorly understood because both scholars and voters tend to limit their focus on candidates to the narrow context of election campaigns. The author argues that a broader view reveals how candidates are linked to a variety of trends and contradictions in contemporary U.S. politics.
The candlefish, enormous schools of which enter the Pacific Northwest’s rivers in the spring, is so rich with oil that when supplied with a wick it can be used as a candle. Thus creatures of the water become transformed into instruments of fire and spirit, ultimately transcending this world.
Written as the author begins to navigate the second half of life, Candlefish unfolds along multiple lines of narrative and reflection. Each poem is rendered from experience and made incandescent by the spark of the author’s intellect and insight.
Whether tending the flower beds, skinnydipping on her birthday, conversing with a grown daughter, or bringing inside the teacup her husband can no longer carry, Elizabeth Biller Chapman distills each moment to its most vital components and makes them luminous with the necessity and surprise of relation.
Elizabeth Biller Chapman’s candlefish gracefully swim toward the pierced horizon all of us must face and are transformed by imaginative compassion as the book develops, season by season, from summer to spring.
Zita Nunes argues that the prevailing narratives of identity formation throughout the Americas share a dependence on metaphors of incorporation and, often, of cannibalism. From the position of the incorporating body, the construction of a national and racial identity through a process of assimilation presupposes a remainder, a residue.
Nunes addresses works by writers and artists who explore what is left behind in the formation of national identities and speak to the limits of the contemporary discourse of democracy. Cannibal Democracy tracks its central metaphor’s circulation through the work of writers such as Mário de Andrade, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Toni Morrison and journalists of the black press, as well as work by visual artists including Magdalena Campos-Pons and Keith Piper, and reveals how exclusion-understood in terms of what is left out-can be fruitfully understood in terms of what is left over from a process of unification or incorporation.
Nunes shows that while this remainder can be deferred into the future-lurking as a threat to the desired stability of the present-the residue haunts discourses of national unity, undermining the ideologies of democracy that claim to resolve issues of race.
Zita Nunes is associate professor of English at the University of Maryland, College Park.
Cannibals All! got more attention in William Lloyd Garrison’s Liberator than any other book in the history of that abolitionist journal. And Lincoln is said to have been more angered by George Fitzhugh than by any other pro-slavery writer, yet he unconsciously paraphrased Cannibals All! in his House Divided speech.
Fitzhugh was provocative because of his stinging attack on free society, laissez-faire economy, and wage slavery, along with their philosophical underpinnings. He used socialist doctrine to defend slavery and drew upon the same evidence Marx used in his indictment of capitalism. Socialism, he held, was only “the new fashionable name for slavery,” though slavery was far more humane and responsible, “the best and most common form of socialism.”
His most effective testimony was furnished by the abolitionists themselves. He combed the diatribes of their friends, the reformers, transcendentalists, and utopians, against the social evils of the North. “Why all this,” he asked, “except that free society is a failure?”
The trouble all started, according to Fitzhugh, with John Locke, “a presumptuous charlatan,” and with the heresies of the Enlightenment. In the great Lockean consensus that makes up American thought from Benjamin Franklin to Franklin Roosevelt, Fitzhugh therefore stands out as a lone dissenter who makes the conventional polarities between Jefferson and Hamilton, or Hoover and Roosevelt, seem insignificant. Beside him Taylor, Randolph, and Calhoun blend inconspicuously into the American consensus, all being apostles of John Locke in some degree. An intellectual tradition that suffers from uniformity—even if it is virtuous, liberal conformity—could stand a bit of contrast, and George Fitzhugh can supply more of it than any other American thinker.
Canoe Country Camping is a complete, entertaining, and up-to-date guide that gives you the information you need for a safe and enjoyable canoe trip.
First-time campers will find answers to all their questions about where to go, how to pack, and what to do. Seasoned campers will find helpful tips to streamline their planning and make their next trip better than ever.
Prepare for all the challenges of the wilderness from the obvious to the unexpected. Michael Furtman, experienced Boundary Waters and Quetico canoeist, helps you: plan your adventure, pick your gear, pack for the portage, paddle efficiently, and prepare a comfortable camp.
Canoe Country Camping is chock full of handy checklists, helpful charts, and detailed drawings. Use it before you go. Take it along in your pack for quick reference. Then get out there with confidence, relax and enjoy your trip.
The vast North Woods, a land magnificently arrayed in the deep greens of pine, spruce, and fir and the brilliant blues of crystal clear lakes, spans the area from Minnesota to Maine and from Michigan to Hudson Bay. With a little help fromCanoe Country Flora, keen explorers will discover a world full of life and wonder in the plants that thrive in this beautiful lake country.
Canoe Country Flora, a friendly field guide, introduces you to ninety-six of the most common trees, shrubs, wildflowers, fungi, ferns, lichens, and other plants you’re likely to encounter during your travels north. Detailed line drawings and brief plant profiles help you recognize what you’re seeing, while “Sparky” Stensaas’s intriguing tales draw you into a deeper study of the plants’s natural and cultural histories.
Each plant is made identifiable and memorable by fascinating facts, handy checklists, diagrams and charts, and interesting activities that help adults and children learn by discovery.
Use this book as a companion to Canoe Country Wildlife or alone as your guide to a unique North Woods adventure.
Warblers, wolves, and whirligig beetles—the creatures of the canoe countrywilderness come alive in Canoe Country Wildlife. In this read-aloud treasure, “Sparky” Stensaas, naturalist and storyteller, intrigues you with his tales of encounters with the forest inhabitants—from tiny toads to majestic moose.
Canoe Country Wildlife, a friendly field guide, introduces you to the wildlife you are most likely to see as you travel in the North Woods. It describes these creatures and their habits accurately so you’ll know where and when to look for them. Detailed line drawings illustrate each animal clearly so you’ll recognize what you’re seeing.
The book is filled with fascinating little-known facts: Did you know that wood frogs can freeze solid, only to live again? That loons can fly a hundred miles an hour? That chipmunks can carry seventy sunflower seeds in their cheeks?
Canoe Country Wildlife includes handy checklists to help you keep track of the critters you encounter, a calendar for you to record the natural events you witness, and activities—one for each animal—that will help both adults and children learn by discovery.
Carry Canoe Country Wildlife in your pack. Your trip will be more enjoyable and your memories will last forever. It’s a great gift for anyone who loves the outdoors.
Thomas Wyatt is the finest English poet between Chaucer and the Elizabethans. Many poems have been wrongly attributed to him, however, and the authenticity of different versions of his lyrics has been a matter of dispute. Richard Harrier makes a significant contribution both by establishing accurate texts and by determining the canon itself.
The only solid foundation for the Wyatt canon is his personal copybook, the Egerton MS, here reproduced in a diplomatic text. The apparatus records all changes within the manuscript and all contemporary variants; explanatory notes are provided. This volume, which includes a detailed and comprehensive analysis of the sources, will stand as the ultimate authority for the text and canon of Wyatt's poems.
This volume of 154 poems by Constantine Cavafy is the entire body of work by the artist widely considered a master of modern Greek poetry. Published only privately during his lifetime, Cavafy's poems achieved international acclaim when writers such as E. M. Forster, Laurence Durrell, T. S. Eliot, and W. H. Auden brought his work to a worldwide audience.
Cavafy was a poet of Alexandria, the city of his birth and his home throughout his adult life. At the confluence of many histories—Greek, Egyptian, Byzantine, modern European—and many religions, the city provided endless inspiration for his brief, intimate portraits of individuals, historic and contemporary, real and imagined. Homoerotic desire, artistic longing, and a nostalgic fatalism suffuse the subjects he examined and laid bare, without metaphor or simile, in free iambic verse.
Published here in the original Greek, with a new English translation by the noted poet Stratis Haviaris on each facing page, and with a foreword by Seamus Heaney, The Canon is Cavafy, familiar and fresh, seen through new eyes, yet instantly recognized: "the Greek gentleman in a straw hat," as Forster called him, "standing absolutely motionless at a slight angle to the universe."
The first systematic analysis of American literature textbooks used by college instructors in the last century
Scholars have long noted the role that college literary anthologies play in the rising and falling reputations of American authors. Canons by Consensus examines this classroom fixture in detail to challenge and correct a number of assumptions about the development of the literary canon throughout the 20th century.
Joseph Csicsila analyzes more than 80 anthologies published since 1919 and traces not only the critical fortunes of individual authors, but also the treatment of entire genres and groupings of authors by race, region, gender, and formal approach. In doing so, he calls into question accusations of deliberate or inadvertent sexism and racism. Selections by anthology editors, Csicsila demonstrates, have always been governed far more by prevailing trends in academic criticism than by personal bias.
Academic anthologies are found to constitute a rich and often overlooked resource for studying American literature, as well as an irrefutable record of the academy’s changing literary tastes throughout the last century.
Canyoneering 2: Technical Loop Hikes is a guide to seven, week-long backpack trips into some for the most unspoiled and least-visited areas in the Utah section of the Colorado Plateau. Every hike contains the four essentials of a great canyoneering route: spectacular canyons, intimate narrows, big views, and physical challenge. Although the routes are difficult, newcomers to the canyons will also find detailed information here that can be used to plan less demanding excursions. Hikes include Muddy Creek in the San Rafael Swell, Dirty Devil North, Dirty Devil South, Dark Canyon, White Canyon, Escalante East, and Escalante South. For experienced canyoneers.
An easy-to-read geological history of the amazing red rock landscapes in southeastern Utah.
Towering red buttes, plunging canyon walls, domes, pinnacles, spires, ten thousand strangely carved forms—what visitor hasn’t marveled at the land of rock in southeastern Utah that is Canyonlands Country?
Canyonlands Country offers a unique geological history of this awesome landscape, in language understandable by the non-geologist. The story is as strange and fascinating as the land itself. Each exposed rock layer has a different geologic history: one is a stream deposit, another is an ancient field of dunes, another was deposited by shallow tropic seas. The Green and Colorado Rivers began carving canyons thirty million years ago, but to understand such relatively recent events Canyonlands Country takes us on a journey of two billion years.
Tours include Arches National Park, Island in the Sky, Needles District, The Maze and Elaterite Basin, Labyrinth and Stillwater Canyons, Meander Canyon, and Cataract Canyon.
The canyons of the southwestern United States and northern Mexico contain some of the most dramatic landscapes in the world. John Annerino's pictorial celebration of this visually rich region is a handsome memento for those who have heard the wind whistling in these haunting canyons, and a beckoning invitation for those who have not yet made the journey.
Annerino has spent much of his adult life exploring this territory—as wilderness runner, adventurer, and photojournalist—and combines his firsthand knowledge with his expertise as a nature photographer and author to create an intimate portrait of these timeless places. Accompanying the photographs are informative essays describing the region's geological and human history.
In the first sustained examination of disability through the lens of political theory, The Capacity Contract shows how the exclusion of disabled people has shaped democratic politics. Stacy Clifford Simplican demonstrates how disability buttresses systems of domination based on race, sex, and gender. She exposes how democratic theory and politics have long blocked from political citizenship anyone whose cognitive capacity falls below a threshold level⎯marginalization with real-world repercussions on the implementation of disability rights today.
Simplican’s compelling ethnographic analysis of the self-advocacy movement describes the obstacles it faces. From the outside, the movement must confront stiff budget cuts and dwindling memberships; internally, self-advocates must find ways to demand political standing without reinforcing entrenched stigma against people with profound cognitive disabilities. And yet Simplican’s investigation also offers democratic theorists and disability activists a more emancipatory vision of democracy as it relates to disability⎯one that focuses on enabling people to engage in public and spontaneous action to disrupt exclusion and stigma.
Taking seriously democratic promises of equality and inclusion, The Capacity Contract rejects conceptions of political citizenship that privilege cognitive capacity and, instead, centers such citizenship on action that is accessible to all people.
Drawing on fieldwork and archival research in Portugal and Cape Verde, Derek Pardue introduces Lisbon's kriolu rap scene and its role in challenging metropolitan Portuguese identities. Pardue demonstrates that Cape Verde, while relatively small within the Portuguese diaspora, offers valuable lessons about the politics of experience and social agency within a postcolonial context that remains poorly understood. As he argues, knowing more about both Cape Verdeans and the Portuguese invites clearer assessments of the relationship between the experience and policies of migration. That in turn allows us to better gauge citizenship as a balance of individual achievement and cultural ascription.
Deftly shifting from domestic to public spaces and from social media to ethnographic theory, Pardue describes an overlooked phenomenon transforming Portugal, one sure to have parallels in former colonial powers across twenty-first-century Europe.
In a model study Jacob Price illuminates the dynamic growth of Britain’s foreign trade in the eighteenth century through an investigation of the investment patterns and credit institutions that financed that expansion. Concentrating on the trade between Britain and the Chesapeake tobacco colonies of Virginia and Maryland, for which a unique set of records exists, Price surveys the ways in which commerce developed and working capital was mobilized in Britain to support expanding overseas trade.
Price develops the clearest picture ever of the financial environment within Britain as it affected Southern colonies in the preindustrial age. He does so by determining the kind of capital resources merchants in foreign trade actually commanded and measuring how much of their own wealth merchants brought to trade. In great and absorbing detail he discusses also the development of merchant-oriented banks in London and other ports, reinvestment of profits, long-term borrowing on bond, and the long-term credit provided to export merchants by wholesalers in textiles, ironmongery, and other industries.
The relationship of debt to the coming of the American Revolution is also treated. Tobacco growers suffered more than others from a psychological unease caused by immense debt and were more revolutionary than farmers with less intensive capital needs and, hence, with lighter debt. This history will enlighten Anglo-American historians, economic historians, and historians of the American revolutionary era.
A New York Times Bestseller
An NPR Best Book of the Year
The epic successor to one of the most important books of the century: at once a retelling of global history, a scathing critique of contemporary politics, and a bold proposal for a new and fairer economic system.
Thomas Piketty’s bestselling Capital in the Twenty-First Century galvanized global debate about inequality. In this audacious follow-up, Piketty challenges us to revolutionize how we think about politics, ideology, and history. He exposes the ideas that have sustained inequality for the past millennium, reveals why the shallow politics of right and left are failing us today, and outlines the structure of a fairer economic system.
Our economy, Piketty observes, is not a natural fact. Markets, profits, and capital are all historical constructs that depend on choices. Piketty explores the material and ideological interactions of conflicting social groups that have given us slavery, serfdom, colonialism, communism, and hypercapitalism, shaping the lives of billions. He concludes that the great driver of human progress over the centuries has been the struggle for equality and education and not, as often argued, the assertion of property rights or the pursuit of stability. The new era of extreme inequality that has derailed that progress since the 1980s, he shows, is partly a reaction against communism, but it is also the fruit of ignorance, intellectual specialization, and our drift toward the dead-end politics of identity.
Once we understand this, we can begin to envision a more balanced approach to economics and politics. Piketty argues for a new “participatory” socialism, a system founded on an ideology of equality, social property, education, and the sharing of knowledge and power. Capital and Ideology is destined to be one of the indispensable books of our time, a work that will not only help us understand the world, but that will change it.
The book is the first comprehensive study of the American copper industry to include labor markets, unionism, and labor relations as an integral part of its focus. It also undertakes a careful examination of the influences exerted by geography and geology in the shaping of the industry.
The study begins with the formation, development, and later histories of all the principal copper producers, their major business and labor policies, technical innovations, attempts at diversification, and foreign ventures. On the labor side, the book examines the beginnings of unionism in the 1880s; the emergence of the Western Federation of Miners in 1893; the later appearance of the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers in 1916. The eventual takeover of the Mine Mill by the Steel workers in 1967 and the reasons for the eventual collapse of the pattern system in 1983 are also carefully considered.
The study emphasizes the role of strategic innovations in shaping American copper history, most prominently in the successive development of underground block-caving and open-pit mining; concentration and flotation; and solvent extraction and electrowinning. The study concludes with an evaluation of the lessons supplied by the past and the prospects for the future of the industry.
Sovereign wealth funds are state-controlled pools of capital that hold financial and real assets, including shares of state enterprises, and manage them to grow the nation’s base of sovereign wealth. The dramatic rise of sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) in both number and size—this group is now larger than the size of global private equity and hedge funds, combined—and the fact that most are located in non-OECD countries, has raised concern about the direction of capitalism. Yet SWFs are not a homogenous group of actors. Why do some countries with large current account surpluses, notably China, create SWFs while others, such as Switzerland and Germany, do not? Why do other countries with no macroeconomic justification, such as Senegal and Turkey, create SWFs? And why do countries with similar macroeconomic features, such as Kuwait and Qatar or Singapore and Hong Kong, choose different types of SWFs?
Capital Choices analyzes the creation of different SWFs from a comparative political economy perspective, arguing that different state-society structures at the sectoral level are the drivers for SWF variation. Juergen Braunstein focuses on the early formation period of SWFs, a critical but little understood area given the high levels of political sensitivity and lack of transparency that surround SWF creation. Braunstein’s novel analytical framework provides practical lessons for the business and finance organizations and policymakers of countries that have created, or are planning to create, SWFs.
Sovereign wealth funds are state-controlled pools of capital that hold financial and real assets, including shares of state enterprises, and manage them to grow the nation’s base of sovereign wealth. The dramatic rise of sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) in both number and size—this group is now larger than the size of global private equity and hedge funds, combined—and the fact that most are located in non-OECD countries, has raised concern about the direction of capitalism. Yet SWFs are not a homogenous group of actors. Why do some countries with large current account surpluses, notably China, create SWFs while others, such as Switzerland and Germany, do not? Why do other countries with no macroeconomic justification, such as Senegal and Turkey, create SWFs? And why do countries with similar macroeconomic features, such as Kuwait and Qatar or Singapore and Hong Kong, choose different types of SWFs?
Capital Choices analyzes the creation of different SWFs from a comparative political economy perspective, arguing that different state-society structures at the sectoral level are the drivers for SWF variation. Juergen Braunstein focuses on the early formation period of SWFs, a critical but little understood area given the high levels of political sensitivity and lack of transparency that surround SWF creation. Braunstein’s novel analytical framework provides practical lessons for the business and finance organizations and policymakers of countries that have created, or are planning to create, SWFs.
Those who support capital punishment often claim that they do so because it provides justice and closure for the victims’ families. In Capital Consequences, attorney Rachel King reminds us that there are other families and other victims who must be considered in the debate over the death penalty.
Combining a narrative voice with vivid, passionate, and painful accounts of the families of death row inmates, the book demonstrates that crimes that lead to death sentences also devastate the families of those convicted. These families, King argues, are the unseen victims of capital punishment.
King challenges readers to question the morality of a punishment that victimizes families of the condemned and ripples out through future generations. Chapters tell the stories of families that have lost life savings supporting an accused loved one, endured intense public scrutiny, been subjected to harassment by the media, and are struggling to live with the inhumane treatment that their loved ones receive on death row. The author also explores the unique nature of the grief that these families suffer. Because their pain tends to elicit less attention and empathy than that of the crime victims’ families, King shows how it becomes much more desperate and isolating.
On a human level, this book is a powerful reminder that tragic events have tragic consequences that far outreach their immediate victims. At the same time, the accounts illustrate many of the flaws inherent in the judicial system—racial and economic bias, incompetent counsel, prosecutorial misconduct, the execution of juveniles, and wrongful convictions, some of which are only now being overturned because of recent advances in DNA technology.
Regardless of which side of the death penalty issue you are on, this book will lead you to pause and consider that all acts—criminal and retributive—have broader human implications than we are sometimes willing to realize.
Some scholars argue that the free movement of capital across borders enhances welfare; others claim it represents a clear peril, especially for emerging nations. In Capital Controls and Capital Flows in Emerging Economies, an esteemed group of contributors examines both the advantages and the pitfalls of restricting capital mobility in these emerging nations.
In the aftermath of the East Asian currency crises of 1997, the authors consider mechanisms that eight countries have used to control capital inflows and evaluate their effectiveness in altering the maturity of the resulting external debt and reducing macroeconomic vulnerability. This volume is essential reading for all those interested in emerging nations and the costs and benefits of restricting international capital flows.
Between 1870 and 1930, Latin American countries were incorporated into global capitalist networks like never before, mainly as exporters of raw materials and importers of manufactured goods. During this Export Age, entire regions were given over to the cultivation of export commodities such as coffee and bananas, capital and labor were relocated to new production centers, and barriers to foreign investment were removed. Capital Fictions investigates the key role played by literature in imagining and interpreting the rapid transformations unleashed by Latin America’s first major wave of capitalist modernization.
Using an innovative blend of literary and economic analysis and drawing from a rich interdisciplinary archive, Ericka Beckman provides the first extended evaluation of Export Age literary production. She traces the emergence of a distinct set of fictions, fantasies, and illusions that accompanied the rise of export-led, dependent capitalism. These “capital fictions” range from promotional pamphlets for Guatemalan coffee and advertisements for French fashions, to novels about stock market collapse in Argentina and rubber extraction in the Amazon.
Beckman explores how Export Age literature anticipated some of the key contradictions faced by contemporary capitalist societies, including extreme financial volatility, vast social inequality, and ever-more-intense means of exploitation. Questioning the opposition between culture and economics in Latin America and elsewhere, Capital Fictions shows that literature operated as a powerful form of political economy during this period.
A New York Times #1 Bestseller
An Amazon #1 Bestseller
A Wall Street Journal #1 Bestseller
A USA Today Bestseller
A Sunday Times Bestseller
A Guardian Best Book of the 21st Century
Winner of the Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award
Winner of the British Academy Medal
Finalist, National Book Critics Circle Award
What are the grand dynamics that drive the accumulation and distribution of capital? Questions about the long-term evolution of inequality, the concentration of wealth, and the prospects for economic growth lie at the heart of political economy. But satisfactory answers have been hard to find for lack of adequate data and clear guiding theories. In Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Thomas Piketty analyzes a unique collection of data from twenty countries, ranging as far back as the eighteenth century, to uncover key economic and social patterns. His findings will transform debate and set the agenda for the next generation of thought about wealth and inequality.
Piketty shows that modern economic growth and the diffusion of knowledge have allowed us to avoid inequalities on the apocalyptic scale predicted by Karl Marx. But we have not modified the deep structures of capital and inequality as much as we thought in the optimistic decades following World War II. The main driver of inequality—the tendency of returns on capital to exceed the rate of economic growth—today threatens to generate extreme inequalities that stir discontent and undermine democratic values. But economic trends are not acts of God. Political action has curbed dangerous inequalities in the past, Piketty says, and may do so again.
A work of extraordinary ambition, originality, and rigor, Capital in the Twenty-First Century reorients our understanding of economic history and confronts us with sobering lessons for today.
A New York Times #1 Bestseller
An Amazon #1 Bestseller
A Wall Street Journal #1 Bestseller
A USA Today Bestseller
A Sunday Times Bestseller
A Guardian Best Book of the 21st Century
Winner of the Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award
Winner of the British Academy Medal
Finalist, National Book Critics Circle Award
“It seems safe to say that Capital in the Twenty-First Century, the magnum opus of the French economist Thomas Piketty, will be the most important economics book of the year—and maybe of the decade.”
—Paul Krugman, New York Times
“The book aims to revolutionize the way people think about the economic history of the past two centuries. It may well manage the feat.”
—The Economist
“Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century is an intellectual tour de force, a triumph of economic history over the theoretical, mathematical modeling that has come to dominate the economics profession in recent years.”
—Steven Pearlstein, Washington Post
“Piketty has written an extraordinarily important book…In its scale and sweep it brings us back to the founders of political economy.”
—Martin Wolf, Financial Times
“A sweeping account of rising inequality…Piketty has written a book that nobody interested in a defining issue of our era can afford to ignore.”
—John Cassidy, New Yorker
“Stands a fair chance of becoming the most influential work of economics yet published in our young century. It is the most important study of inequality in over fifty years.”
—Timothy Shenk, The Nation
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