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Kashmir as a Borderland
The Politics of Space and Belonging across the Line of Control
Antía Mato Bouzas
Amsterdam University Press, 2019
*Kashmir as a Borderland: The Politics of Space and Belonging across the Line of Control* examines the Kashmir dispute from both sides of the Line of Control (LoC) and within the theoretical frame of border studies. It draws on the experiences of those living in these territories such as divided families, traders, cultural and social activists. Kashmir is a borderland, that is, a context for spatial transformations, where the resulting interactions can be read as a process of ‘becoming’ rather than of ‘being’. The analysis of this borderland shows how the conflict is manifested in territory, in specific locations with a geopolitical meaning, evidencing the discrepancy between ‘representation’ and the ‘living’. The author puts forward the concept of belonging as a useful category for investigating more inclusive political spaces.
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Keeping Family in an Age of Long Distance Trade, Imperial Expansion, and Exile, 1550-1850
Heather Dalton
Amsterdam University Press, 2020
Keeping Family in an Age of Long Distance Trade, Imperial Expansion and Exile, 1550-1850 brings together eleven original essays by an international group of scholars, each investigating how family, or the idea of family, was maintained or reinvented when husbands, wives, children, apprentices, servants or slaves separated, or faced separation, from their household. The result is a fresh and geographically wide-ranging discussion about the nature of family and its intersection with travel over a three hundred year period during which roles and relationships, within and between households, were increasingly affected by trade, settlement, and empire building. The imperial project may have influenced different regions in different ways at different times yet, as this collection reveals, families, especially those transcending national ties and traditional boundaries were central to its progress. Together, these essays bring new understandings of the foundations of our interconnected world and of the people who contributed to it.
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A Key to Dutch History
The Cultural Canon of the Netherlands
Edited by Frits van Oostrom and Hubert Slings
Amsterdam University Press, 2007
Many people know the stories behind the tulip mania in the 17th century and the legacy of the Dutch East India Company, but what basic knowledge of Dutch history and culture should be passed on to future generations? A Key to Dutch History and its resulting overview of historical highlights, assembled by a number of specialists in consultation with the Dutch general public, provides a thought-provoking and timely answer. The democratic process behind the volume is reminiscent of the way in which the Netherlands has succeeded for centuries at collective craftsmanship, and says as much about the Netherlands as does the outcome of the opinions voiced.The Cultural Canon of the Netherlands consists of a list of fifty topics from Dutch culture and history, varying from the megalithic tombs in the province of Drenthe and Willem of Orange to the Dutch constitution and the vast natural gas field in the province of Groningen. These fifty topics act as a framework for understanding and even studying Dutch culture and history. The canon should lead to further understanding and deepening of our knowledge of our past and act as an inspirational source for pupils, students and the public at large.
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A Key to the Treasure of the Hakim
Artistic and Humanistic Aspects of Nizami Ganjavi’s Khamsa
Johann Christoph Bürgel
Amsterdam University Press
This “Key” to the Khamsa consists of thirteen essays by eminent scholars in the field of Persian Studies, each focusing on different aspects of the Khamsa, which is a collection of five long poems written by the Persian poet Nizami of Ganja. Nizami (1141-1209) lived and worked in Ganja in present-day Azerbaijan. He is widely recognized as one of the main poets of Medieval Persia, a towering figure who produced outstanding poetry, straddling mysticism, romances and epics. He has left his mark on the whole Persian-speaking world and countless younger poets in the area stretching from the Ottoman to the Mughal worlds (present-day Turkey, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia, Iran, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Pakistan, India) have found him an inspiration and have tried to emulate him. His work has influenced such other immense poets as Hafez, Rumi, and Saadi. His five masnavis (long poems) address a variety of topics and disciplines and have all enjoyed enormous fame, as the countless surviving manuscripts of his work indicate. His heroes, Khosrow and Shirin, Leili and Majnun, Iskandar count amongst the stars of the Persian literary firmament and have become household names all over the Islamic world. The essays in the present volume constitute a significant development in the field of Nizami-studies, and on a more general level, of classical Persian literature. They focus on topics such as mysticism, art history, comparative literature, science, and philosophy. they show how classical Greek knowledge mingles in a unique manner with the Persian past and the Islamic culture in Nizami’s world. They reflect a high degree of engagement with the existing scholarship in the field, they revive and challenge traditional views on the poet and his work and are indispensable both for specialists in the field and for anyone interested in the movement of ideas in the Medieval world.
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Keywords of Identity, Race, and Human Mobility in Early Modern England
Nandini Das
Amsterdam University Press, 2021
What did it mean to be a stranger in sixteenth and seventeenth-century England? How were other nations, cultures, and religions perceived? What happened when individuals moved between languages, countries, religions, and spaces? Following the model of Raymond Williams’s classic Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (1976), Keywords of Identity, Race, and Human Mobility analyses a selection of terms that were central to the conceptualisation of identity, race, migration, and transculturality in the early modern period. In many cases, the concepts, preconceptions, and debates that they embody – or sometimes subsume – came to play formative roles in the articulation of identity, rights, and power in subsequent periods. Together, the essays in this volume provide an invaluable resource for anyone interested in the development of issues of identity, belonging, and human mobility.
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King Alfred the Great, his Hagiographers and his Cult
A Childhood Remembered
Tomás Mario Kalmar
Amsterdam University Press, 2023
This book situates Alfred the Great in his hagiographic context. For 150 years, the fables told in the ninth century about Alfred’s childhood have posed interlocking disciplinary challenges to historians committed to evicting romance from history. Blending current Hagiography Studies with historical, literary, and biblical hermeneutics can help us forgo the anti-hagiographic commitments which motivated the scholars who purified the Victorian cult of Alfred by expunging his legends and salvaging his historicity. The book focusses on the typological functions of three Alfredian fables from the Old English Chronicle, the Old English Boethius, and Asser’s Vita Ælfredi, analyses the plot common to all three, critiques the psychological conjecture that Alfred’s childhood memory was their common source, and shows that synoptically they can help us see how Alfred shaped the curve of his own life’s destiny and how he engaged in the formation of his own cult to last a thousand years.
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Kingship and Polity on the Himalayan Borderland
Rajput Identity during the Early Colonial Encounter
Arik Moran
Amsterdam University Press, 2019
Kingship and Polity on the Himalayan Borderland explores the modern transformation of state and society in the Indian Himalaya. Centred on three Rajput led-kingdoms during the transition to British rule (c. 1790-1840) and their interconnected histories, it demonstrates how border making practices engendered a modern reading of ‘tradition’ that informs communal identities to this day. Countering the common depiction of these states as all-male, caste-exclusive entities, it reveals the strong familial base of Rajput polity, wherein women — and regent queens in particular — played a key role alongside numerous non-Rajput groups. Drawing on rich archival records, rarely examined local histories, and nearly two decades of ethnographic research, it offers an alternative to the popular and scholarly discourses that developed with the rise of colonial knowledge. The analysis exposes the cardinal contribution of borderland spaces to the fabrication of group identities. This book will interest historians and anthropologists of South Asia and of the Himalaya, as well as scholars working on postcolonialism, gender, and historiography.
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Knowledge and Culture in the Early Dutch Republic
Isaac Beeckman in Context
Klaas van Berkel
Amsterdam University Press, 2022
The Dutch Republic around 1600 was a laboratory of the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century. Here conditions were favourable for the development of new ways of knowing nature and the natural philosopher Isaac Beeckman, who was born in Middelburg in 1588, was a seminal figure in this context. He laid the groundwork for the strictly mechanical philosophy that is at the heart of the new science. Descartes and others could build on what they learned, directly or indirectly, from Beeckman. As previous studies have mainly dealt with the scientific content of Beeckman’s thinking, this volume also explores the wider social, scientific and cultural context of his work. Beeckman was both a craftsman and a scholar and fruitfully combined artisanal ways of knowing with international scholarly traditions. Beeckman’s extensive private notebook offers a unique perspective on the cultures of knowledge that emerged in this crucial period in intellectual history.
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Knowledge Exchanges Between Portugal and Europe
Maritime Diplomacy, Espionage, and Nautical Science in the Early Modern World (15th-17th Centuries)
Nuno Vila-Santa
Amsterdam University Press

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Korea 1905–1945
From Japanese Colonialism to Liberation and Independence
Ku Daeyeol
Amsterdam University Press, 2021
This important new study by one of Korea’s leading historians focuses on the international relations of colonial Korea – from the Japanese rule of the peninsula and its foreign relations (1905–1945) to the ultimate liberation of the country at the end of the Second World War. In addition, it fills a significant gap – the ‘blank space’ – in Korean diplomatic history. Furthermore, it highlights several other fundamental aspects in the history of modern Korea, such as the historical perception of the policy-making process and the attitudes of both China and Britain which influenced US policy regarding Korea at the end of World War II.
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Korean Cinema in Global Contexts
Post-Colonial Phantom, Blockbuster and Trans-Cinema
Soyoung Kim
Amsterdam University Press, 2022
Offering the most comprehensive analysis of Korean cinema from its early history to the present, and including the films of Park Chan-wook, Bong Joon-ho and Kim Ki-young, Korean Cinema in Global Contexts: Postcolonial Phantom, Blockbuster and Trans-Cinema situates itself in the local, Inter-Asian, and transnational contexts by mobilizing the critical frameworks of feminism, postcolonial critique and comparative film studies. It is attentive to an enmeshment of the cinematic, aesthetics, politics and cultural history.
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Kurt Baschwitz
A Pioneer of Communication Studies and Social Psychology
Jaap van Ginneken
Amsterdam University Press, 2018
In this accessible, unique study of a forgotten but noteworthy figure, the author tells the story of the life of Kurt Baschwitz (1886—1968), a scholar who fled from the Nazis. He wrote six books, never translated into English, on four related themes: the press, propaganda, politics, and persecution. Baschwitz independently developed concepts that are now seen as key to communication science and socialpsychology, and the author places Baschwitz’s ideas in the wider context of his dramatic life and times.
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Kyiv, Ukraine
Roman Adrian Cybriwsky
Amsterdam University Press, 2014
The unrest and violence in Ukraine shocked the world, and the region’s long-term future remains troublingly uncertain. Focusing on the difficulty of Kiev’s transition from socialism to market democracy, this book demonstrates how Ukraine reached this turbulent point. Roman Adrian Cybriwsky delves deeply into the changing social geography of the city, recent urban development, and critical problems such as official corruption, inequality, sex tourism, and the heedless destruction of the city’s historical architecture—all difficulties that have contributed incrementally to Ukrainian citizens’ anger against their government. This thoroughly revised edition offers the clearest picture we’ve had yet of what has happened—and what is likely still to come—in Ukraine.

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Kyiv, Ukraine - Revised Edition
The City of Domes and Demons from the Collapse of Socialism to the Mass Uprising of 2013-2014
Roman Adrian Cybriwsky
Amsterdam University Press, 2014
The unrest and violence in Ukraine in recent years shocked the world, and the region's long-term future remains troublingly uncertain. Focusing on the difficulty of Kiev's transition from socialism to market democracy, this book demonstrates how Ukraine reached this turbulent point. Roman Adrian Cybriwsky delves deeply into the changing social geography of the city, recent urban development, and critical problems such as official corruption, inequality, sex tourism, and the heedless destruction of the city's historical architecture - all difficulties that have contributed incrementally to Ukrainian citizens' anger against their government. This thoroughly revised edition brings Cybriwsky's account of events and their ramifications fully up to date, offering the clearest picture we've had yet of what has happened - and what is likely still to come - in Ukraine.
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Kyoto’s Renaissance
Ancient Capital for Modern Japan
John Breen
Amsterdam University Press, 2020
Draws on archive of material, a first in English to take an in-depth look at Kyoto’s modern transformation – its reinvention after ‘collapse’ (Meiji Restoration) and relocation of the imperial court to Tokyo. Includes: introduction, chapters on notable historical elements that sustain Kyoto as a quintessentially modern ‘ancient capital’ today.
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