As a moral phenomenon, promises have long received great amounts of attention in philosophical debates within both normative ethics and metaethics. This book defends a novel trust-based form of non-reductivism about promises and promissory normativity.

There is a tension inherent in the ways in which promises feature in our ethical thought. On the one hand, that one is obligated to keep one's promises appears to be one of the most straightforward, unquestionable moral truths around. On the other hand, promissory obligation, as an obligation voluntarily incurred through a performative speech act, has appeared to many as mysterious, and thus in need of a specific explanation. This book sets out from this tension to substantially advance debates both about the nature of promises and promissory normativity, and by extension, normative powers more generally. It develops a comprehensive account of promissory normativity, the "Two-Level Trust View". This view retains the intuitive plausibility of a non-reductive account of promissory normativity, according to which the mere fact that one has validly promised is sufficient to render a breach of promise morally wrong. At the same time, it also provides a powerful and theoretically appealing value-based explanation of our promissory power, a type of explanation traditionally thought to be limited only to reductive accounts of promissory normativity.

Because You Promised will appeal to researchers and graduate students working in normative ethics and metaethics, philosophy of language, political philosophy, and philosophy of law.

From the early nineteenth century, Indian itinerant artists have been journeying to the imperial centers. The emerging Indian circus enabled a multitude of surplus labour and migrant artists to find their place within its rubric, subsequent to the encounters with the colonial circuses. The touring Indian circus along with its performers - both human and non-human - played a crucial role in the global circus networks, provoking a range of receptions and discourse. This collection features source materials, including advertisements, biographies, legal documents, news articles, playbills, posters, reviews, thereby filling a critical void in circus histories.

This book introduces military humanities (MILHUM) as a new field of inquiry to demonstrate the utility of the humanities for a critical understanding of the military and its practices, and as a tool for developing these practices.

Modelled on the medical humanities, MILHUM aims to play an analogous role for military education and the military profession. This edited volume gathers contributions from authors based at both civilian and military higher education institutions, representing a wide range of humanities traditions - from linguistics, languages, and literature, to music, history, and philosophy. Throughout the chapters, the authors draw on the tools of their disciplines and others to present an anthology that spans both empirical and theoretical analyses and investigates militaries and war. The result is a volume that persuasively and cohesively argues for the value of the humanities for military practice and professionalism by offering insights that will inform the conduct of military operations, the provision of military education, and the development of professional ethos - all arrived at through humanities approaches.

This book will prove a valuable resource to military academic communities, comprised of both civilian scholars and military scholar-practitioners at military academic institutions and civilian academic institutions with military education programmes. It will also engage scholars and advanced students in the fields of critical military studies, war studies, security studies, conflict studies, and civil-military relations.

A multisensory approach to the study of Shi?i Iran that examines how devotional Moharram performances changed over time

The mourning traditions of Moharram comprise a body of Shi?i Muslim devotional performances commemorating the martyrdom of Hosayn ibn ?Ali, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad and the Third Imam of the Shi?i, in 680 CE. These traditional rites are performed during a period of communal mourning when Shi?is remember Hosayn's sacrifice and affirm their allegiance to him and to the Prophet's family. Through remembering the martyrs of Karbala, Shi?i Muslims reflect on their own afflictions and aspirations, and how these bear consequences for everyday ethical and devotional conduct.

Babak Rahimi analyzes Moharram in Iran through the five senses-sight, sound, touch, smell, and taste-with an emphasis on the relationship between religious practices as embodied experiences and how these performances-and practitioners' experiences of them-have changed over time. Rahimi begins his investigation in the nineteenth-century Qajar period, when Moharram became a pervasive urban communal practice across most of Iran. He covers the Qajar-era dramatic performances of ta?ziyeh, their transformation into cultural spectacles during the Pahlavi era, the public processions in the form of urban street protests in 1978, the tent-burning rituals in the southern city of Bushehr in 2006, and, lastly, the votive performances during Moharram in the digital sphere during the pandemic in 2020.

Through the study of mourning in terms of the senses in a specific historical and social context, Senses of Mourning not only shows the changing embodied dimensions of religious practices that have played an integral role in the complex lifeworld of Shi?i Iranians but also details the transformation of Moharram within the broader history of Shi?i Iran in an increasingly interconnected global era. The book's multisensory approach sheds new light on the performativity of embodied practices, in which spiritualities, materialities, and the politics of the sacred are articulated through lived performances over time.

The Language Movement in Bangladesh charts the Bangla Language Movement from a rhetorical perspective. Following Partition in 1947, major conflicts over land, religion, power, and language characterized the newly independent nations of India and Pakistan. The debate over recognizing Bangla as a state language in East Pakistan was particularly consequential. Lasting nearly a decade, it upended Pakistan's political and social order and set the stage for Bangladeshi independence in 1971. Shakil Rabbi investigates the rhetorical facets of this debate and its takeaways for critical conversations around translingualist perspectives and rhetorical sovereignty. Rabbi analyzes the role of traditional, modernist, and folk ideologies during this era of subcontinental history through a combination of digital humanities and translingualist methodologies. The Language Movement in Bangladesh adds to scholarship around language rights and language ideologies with an examination of a politically explosive debate in a non-Western and postcolonial context.

How officials in bureaucratic institutions in Tajikistan, though well-meaning, create a postcolonial, problematic "migrant"

Making Migrants explores the postcolonial life of institutions and law in Tajikistan, finding that bureaucratic spaces render people who seek to work abroad into the subjective construct of a "migrant." Anthropologist Malika Bahovadinova argues that this category describes not an individual, but a broader process of government regulation and control. Both structural and literal violence is entrenched in the bureaucratic process, which, in our increasingly mobile world, unfolds in a hostile global context where nation-states seek to make the figure of the "migrant" an "illegal" one.

Through an examination of migration officials' day-to-day work facilitating migration from Tajikistan to Russia, Bahovadinova reveals how 10 percent of Tajikistan's population has moved to Russia in search of stronger economic opportunities. She finds that officials face steep challenges in this work as they grapple with deeply unequal and asymmetrical relationships with Russia, donor states, and international experts, while coming face-to-face with postcolonial legacies from the Soviet past. By exploring relationships between history, pedagogy, and law in migration bureaucracy, Bahovadinova highlights the limited possibilities available to officials in global migration management, asks how governmental ideas and practices develop, and uncovers the challenges that transnational citizens face when they leave their countries to work without forfeiting their original citizenship.

This case shows how postcolonial countries that export workers introduce and replicate colonial rationalities that understand laborers as "migrants" or "illegals" in receiving states. By attaching the term "illegal" to people from a former colony, Russia shapes representations of Tajikistan's citizens as inherently potentially criminal and dangerous "others," while benefitting from their temporary labor. Ultimately, Making Migrants uncovers how introducing and performing "migration management" in a postcolonial environment aligns with and reinforces colonial rationalities about people, labor, economic opportunity, and bureaucratic authority.

This book is part of a two-part volume on the Liberal Party of Australia edited by Zareh Ghazarian, Matteo Bonotti, and Marija Taflaga. This volume contributes to the understanding of political parties, especially the sub-discipline of Australian politics. Australia remains one of the oldest liberal democracies in the world with a stable party system. It provides an excellent case study to focus on political parties. This book focuses on the Liberal Party, which has been a very successful major party since its creation in 1944.

The book assembles a range of experts to analyse the Liberal Party in contemporary Australia. Central to this volume are discussions about party origins, organisation, structure, and operation. The volume casts a critical eye over the Liberal Party at a time when the Australian party system is under pressure from new and emerging challenges. The book starts a new conversation about the role and impact of parties in liberal democracies. It aims to propel new research and interest in understanding major parties in contemporary society.

This is an essential volume for scholars, researchers, students, and general readers who are seeking an authoritative analysis of right-of-centre political parties and how they impact policy in practice.

The exploration and settlement of the Pacific Island world is one of the most remarkable achievements of humanity. Early seafarers, skilled in navigation, discovered diverse habitats and biotas extending across a third of the globe. In this "sea of islands," they established thriving communities where they lived for thousands of years. Today, although island ecosystems and cultures are facing great change, Pacific Island peoples remain resilient.

This new edition of a popular text reviews the diverse landforms, climates, ecosystems, societies, and cultures of the Pacific region. Seventy-five contributors-including numerous Indigenous scholars-address two key themes: (1) environmental dilemmas and possibilities, and (2) demographic, economic, and political challenges facing the people of the region.

New chapters highlight hydrology, ecosystem disturbance, conservation, Indigenous origins and activism, social media, ethnography, kava, contemporary dance, theater, and the cultural impact of globalization.

Other noteworthy chapters are significantly updated: biogeographical dynamics, prehistory of Near and Remote Oceania, fisheries and aquaculture, the fluidity of gender, mobility and urbanization, tourism as encounter, island economies, shifts in literary trends, Pacific music, water and development, and a new overview of land, marine, and water tenure.

The book concludes with a reflective essay. Pacific Island societies have been coping with environmental and demographic challenges for millennia; surviving societies have much to teach us about sustainable living, social justice, and reconciliation.

Policy makers, educators, students, and the general public will find this book an indispensable resource for understanding the region's past, present, and future.

Marshalling unprecedented global scholarship, Allen Hertzke demonstrates how religious freedom is pivotal to democratic, peaceful, and flourishing societies.

The twenty-first century has witnessed a rising crisis of religious repression and persecution. In Why Religious Freedom Matters, Allen Hertzke synthesizes vast evidence from history, ethnography, and worldwide statistical analyses to make the compelling empirical case for the role of religious liberty in shaping a better global future.

In rich detail, Hertzke demonstrates how religious freedom nurtures democracy, fosters prosperity, and cultivates international peace. The book also reveals the surprising ways that religious liberty and equality unleash personal agency that empowers women and uplifts the poor. Religious freedom uniquely matters, Hertzke argues, because it goes to the heart of human personhood and aspiration-the right "to be who we are," to act on ultimate commitments, and to be treated with equal worth and dignity.

Based on a quarter century of immersion in global networks of scholarship and activism on religious freedom, Hertzke has produced a landmark volume showing how we can navigate the challenge of living with our differences in a shrinking world.

In the dark days of World War II, just after Pearl Harbor, Japanese forces were moving almost at will across Southeast Asia and the Pacific. With his troops besieged in the Philippines and his bomber and fighter squadrons nearly reduced to impotence, General MacArthur pressured the US War Department to provide urgent help, particularly for replacements for the B-17 bombers decimated in the December 8 attack on Clark Field. President Roosevelt committed to send a large force of heavy bombers and their crews to the Philippines, a reinforcement plan code named "Project X."

During the following weeks, the air force combat command made frenzied efforts to access the sixty-five Boeing B-17Es and fifteen Consolidated LB-30 heavy bombers that were to comprise the Project X force. The novice crews that were cobbled together would be required to fly their bombers two-thirds of the way around the globe, from MacDill Field in Florida to their new destination on the island of Java, where they were immediately thrown into combat. Project X, as the first test of the doctrine of strategic bombing, was an assignment unprecedented in US military history, though it was ultimately doomed to failure.

Continuing his masterful series of books on the air war in the Pacific Theater, military historian William H. Bartsch takes readers inside the headquarters planning rooms, the front-line command posts, and the cockpits of the aircraft to chronicle another chapter in the early days of the Allied effort to meet the Japanese challenge. Desperate Gambit: Project X and the American Aerial Defense of Java, 1941-1942 will be eagerly received by both general readers and professional historians interested in the evolution of aerial combat and strategic bombing of World War II in the Pacific.

This book is a collection of lectures from the academic seminar series, "Power and Order: Social Governance in Imperial China," organized by the School of History and Culture at Henan University.

It features presentations by renowned scholars, including Yan Buke, Bao Weimin, Zhang Jianguang, and Hou Xudong, among others. The book is divided into three parts. Part I, "The Nature of the Imperial System," examines the development and trends of Chinese history under imperial rule through the lenses of bureaucracy, economy, and society. Part II, "The Working Mechanism of Social Structure," explores how the imperial state operated and covers issues such as public opinion control, financial sustainability, and the primary-level administration and exercise of power. Part III, "The Lives of Officials and Ordinary People," discusses the people within the autocratic state. Traditional historiography often overlooks what people from different social strata and backgrounds did and how they lived. However, this information is critical to understanding history, both the broad contours and the granular detail.

The book will be valuable for scholars and students of social governance and for anyone interested in the hierarchical order of ancient China.

This book examines the relationship between education, schools, and Confucian classical studies during the late Qing and early Republican periods.

The imperial examination system could not accommodate Western learning. Then, Chinese learning was incorporated into the framework of new schools that offered instruction in different academic disciplines defined by Western ideas about knowledge and learning. Eventually, Confucian classical studies were removed from the formal curriculum of the new education system. These efforts to both preserve and eliminate Confucian classical studies reflect the contested relationships between Chinese and Western cultures, as well as between tradition and modernity, during an intellectually tumultuous period in Chinese history. The book's detailed discussion of how those committed to conserving the old and those eager to embrace the new navigated the treacherous politics of educational policies and public opinion sheds light on how these competing intellectual impulses shaped the country's mass and elite educational landscape for decades to come.

The book is intended for scholars and students of history, pedagogy, and cultural studies, as well as anyone interested in traditional Chinese culture.

Starting with the distinct geomorphological concepts of "highlands" and "lowlands" in the Jiangnan region, this volume examines the evolution of the agricultural hydraulic system, settlement patterns, land recultivation, and administrative divisions in the area east of Taihu Lake between the eleventh and sixteenth centuries.

The book is divided into three parts. Part I, consisting of Chapters 1, 2, and 3, traces changes in agricultural-hydraulic patterns and the development of the commercial economy over 600 years. It also recounts the evolution of Taihu Lake's overall inflow and outflow patterns. Part II, comprising Chapters 4, 5, and 6, builds on Part I, exploring the region's settlement changes and land development beginning in the thirteenth century. This section covers significant topics, including changes in land tax policy, rural power growth, the grain chief system establishment, market town development, tax equalization reforms, and migrant peasant community formation for land recultivation. Part III, consisting of Chapters 7, 8, and 9, discusses how extensive land enclosure, heavy taxation on official fields, and the flourishing maritime transport system promoted the establishment of new administrative divisions. The part focuses on the evolution of these divisions and their relationship with land development in the region, revealing significant changes in the imperial Chinese social and economic landscape.

This book is intended for students and scholars of history, geography, and Asian studies, as well as general readers.

This book provides a comprehensive analysis of post-2002 political, economic and military relations between China and Turkey. It argues that while bilateral relations have expanded, the interactions have been inconsistent and largely driven by developmental imperatives rather than strategic decision-making.

Using primary sources, including interviews with government officials and experts, alongside international relations theory, the author analyses the motives and actions of both nations to demonstrate how China and Turkey pursue their interests through overlapping yet misaligned connectivity initiatives that limit the depth of their partnership. The structural constraints tied to issues such as the Uyghur question and NATO alignment form a constant backdrop. These constraints become salient when political or economic triggers intervene so that what appears to be oscillation between convergence and divergence is better understood as compartmentalised engagement rather than a broader strategic realignment.

This volume will appeal to scholars and students in the fields of international relations, global security and economic relations, as well as those specialising in China studies, alliance behaviours, middle power balancing and Asian and Middle Eastern studies. It will also be a useful resource for researchers interested in the geopolitical dynamics of the region and the broader implications of these relations on global politics.

This book examines the multifaceted dimensions of Indo-Taiwanese relations, exploring historical connections, political constraints, and opportunities for collaboration. The analysis addresses Taiwan's strategic significance for India beyond technology manufacturing, examining bilateral relations across trade, investment, culture, education, and technology sectors. The work provides insights from diplomatic interactions and assesses Taiwan's role in the global semiconductor industry, including:

• Comprehensive analysis of Indo-Taiwanese relations addressing historical connections, political constraints, and collaborative opportunities
• Examination of Taiwan's strategic significance for India beyond information and communication technology manufacturing
• Analysis of bilateral relations across multiple domains including trade, investment, culture, education, and technology
• Assessment of Taiwan's role as a key player in the global semiconductor industry and its potential for India's economic development
• Exploration of emerging trends and future prospects for cooperation between India and Taiwan

The book identifies positive trajectory for bilateral relations marked by growing mutual understanding and cooperation. Essential reading for scholars of international relations, Asian studies, and contemporary diplomacy.

This title has been co-published with Knowledge World Publishers. T&F does not sell or distribute the print versions in Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri lanka

Between 1392 and 1592-a period bounded by Japanese pirate raids along the Korean coast and Japan's invasion of Choson Korea-more than 4,600 Japanese trade missions were recorded by the Choson government. In response to these missions, the famous official Sin Sukchu compiled regulations, detailed information about Japanese contacts, and other material, which was printed in 1472 as the Haedong chegukki. Additional information was added in 1512, creating a still more detailed report for overseeing Japanese and Ryukyuan diplomacy and trade with the Choson government. The 1512 text, which is translated here into English for the first time, shows in rich detail how Korea managed these foreign relations for some two centuries. The regulations illustrate the depth of the management of contact, trade, movement, and other aspects of presence in Choson. Korea-Japan trade practices are depicted in numerous profiles of Japanese contacts from Tsushima to Kyoto, including the use of impostor identities designed in Japan for trade and diplomacy in the second half of the fifteenth century and sixteenth century.

Copious notes and explications supplement the present translation of the Haedong chegukki and supply the reader with the background information necessary to identify the names and places mentioned and understand their relation to Korean and Japanese political history and the structure of relations that linked the two countries. Historians of Korea, Japan, and East Asian foreign relations will find the translation a most valuable resource.

Can food determine your fate? Could indulging in delicacies bring calamity to your community? Nourishing Life reevaluates the history of Japanese food culture by examining how ideas of healthy eating became both a popular phenomenon and a matter of grave concern among trained medical experts and amateur culinary enthusiasts alike. Beginning in the eighteenth century, Japan witnessed an unprecedented explosion of popular interest in dietary advice, compiled in commercially printed manuals, pamphlets, and guides to household know-how, dedicated to practices for promoting well-being known collectively as "nourishing life."

Nourishing Life is the first book-length study to explore why ordinary people ate what they did, how these ideas on proper eating came to be, and what social, economic, and moral concerns propelled their rise. Joshua Schlachet argues that diet was never value-free, nor was it reducible to an objective relationship between nutrients and their physiological outcomes in the body. Instead, guidance on dietetics conveyed priorities about how well-nourished bodies were meant to act in the world, whether as agricultural workers, samurai bureaucrats, or merchant consumers. Failure to keep a proper diet carried life or death consequences, according to these guides, that could bring not just disease to oneself but financial and moral ruin to one's household, domain, or even society at large. The book thus reveals an early modern dietetic revolution in the making, which disrupted older forms of expertise and provided a venue to critique official policies on eating and living right, prior to the introduction of modern scientific nutrition.

In Nourishing Life, Schlachet investigates how early modern Japanese society became invested in eating-and thinking about eating-with unprecedented enthusiasm and anxiety, asking what it felt like not just to survive from food but to live with it. In doing so, it uncovers a terrain of knowledge and practice both unexpected and profoundly relatable to our contemporary struggle to navigate the cacophony of dietary recommendations around us. Tracing these themes across two centuries of historical change, Nourishing Life tells the story of how diet in early modern Japan became as much about maintaining a healthy society as a healthy body.