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This book presents the history of southern Iberia and the western Maghrib, and the Strait of Gibraltar between them, as a single bicontinental borderland, from roughly 1850 to 1970. Drawing on primary and secondary sources from several countries, it posits a long historical arc of transformation from a remote and hostile religious frontier into a multilaterally managed regional order. By the nineteenth century, the Strait of Gibraltar was becoming a dynamic focus of imperial positioning, migration, brigandage, and exchange. As a consequence, coastal outposts like Tangier, Gibraltar, and Melilla became centers of an emerging bicontinental society bringing together a kaleidoscope of ethno-religious groups. These developments produced conflict but also drew sovereign powers together to confront common challenges, such as controlling epidemic disease, defeating warlords, and managing borders. Thus, over the course of a century, despite periods of considerable violence, an international order gradually emerged in the western Mediterranean. As European empire withdrew in the late twentieth century, the region did not revert to the hostile frontier of earlier times but inherited the legacy of a relatively stable and resilient regional order. Conceptualizing the borderland in this way provides a single transnational framework to explore connections between Mediterranean geopolitics, colonialism, border formation, smuggling and brigandage, and the civil and international violence of the twentieth century. It also addresses the role of mobility in international relations, the dynamics of Muslim-Jewish relations in the context of European empire, and the ongoing controversies over Gibraltar, Ceuta, and Melilla.

China plays a variety of status games, sometimes emphasizing its status as an emerging great power and other times highlighting its status as a fragile developing country. The reasons for this are unclear. Drawing on original Chinese sources, social psychological theories, and international relations theories, this book provides a theoretically informed analysis of China’s global rebranding and repositioning in the twenty-first century. Contrary to offensive realism and power transition theory, the book argues that China is not always a status maximizer eager to replace the United States as the new global leader. Differing from most constructivist and psychological studies that focus on the status seeking of rising powers, this study develops a theory of status signaling that combines both rationalist and constructivist insights. The book argues that Chinese leaders face competing pressure from domestic and international audiences to project different images. The book suggests that China’s continual struggle for international status is primarily driven by domestic political calculations. Meanwhile, at the international level, China is concerned about over-recognition of its status for instrumental reasons. The theoretical argument is illustrated through detailed analysis of Chinese foreign policy. Examining major cases such as China’s military transformation, China’s regional diplomacy, and China’s global diplomacy during the 1997 Asian and 2008 global financial crises, this book makes important contributions to international relations theory and Asian studies.

This book argues that analyzing emigration, immigration, and re-migration under the framework of contemporaneous migration directs attention to the citizenship formations that interconnect migration sites, shaping the lives of citizens in motion. It departs from conventional approaches that study migration sites in isolation or as snapshots in time. Taking Chinese emigration as the starting point, the analysis becomes deepened by incorporating insights from migrant-receiving countries, namely Canada and Singapore, which are facing new emigration or re-migration trends among their own citizens. By analyzing shifts in migration patterns over time, we also come to understand how China is becoming an immigration country. The arguments offer new insights for researchers studying Chinese migration and diaspora. As an analytical approach, contemporaneous migration contributes to our theorization of citizenship and territory, fraternity and alterity, ethnicity, and the co-constitution of time and space.

This book seeks a better understanding of the politics, society, and culture of early-modern Korea by tracing and narrating the history of the descendants of the Koryŏ dynasty (918–1392). Decades after persecution that virtually exterminated the former royals, the Kaesŏng Wang, the Chosŏn dynasty (1392–1910) sought to bolster its legitimacy as the successor of Koryŏ. Emulating Chinese historical precedents, by the mid-fifteenth century, Chosŏn had rehabilitated the surviving Wangs. Contrary to the popular assumption that the Wangs remained politically marginalized, many fared well. The most privileged among them won the patronage of the Chosŏn court for which they performed ancestral rites in honor of certain Koryŏ rulers as selected by Chosŏn, passed government service examinations, attained prestigious offices, commanded armies, and constituted elite lineages throughout Korea. As members of a revived aristocratic descent group, the Kaesŏng Wang were committed to Confucian cultural and moral norms, at the heart of which was a subject’s loyalty to the ruler—the Chosŏn monarch. At the same time, Chosŏn increasingly honored Koryŏ loyalists and legacies. An emerging body of subversive narratives, both written and oral, articulated sympathy toward the Wangs as victims of the tumultuous politics of the Koryŏ-Chosŏn dynastic change, although the Wangs themselves steered clear of this discourse until after Japan’s abolition of the Chosŏn monarchy in 1910. Forces of modernity such as imperialism, colonialism, nationalism, urbanization, industrialization, and immigration transformed the Kaesŏng Wang as the progeny of fallen royals to individuals from all walks of life.

Between Iran and Zion analyzes the responses of Iranian Jews to the social, political, and cultural developments of the twentieth century. The book examines their integration into the nation-building projects of the twentieth century (by the first and second Pahlavi monarchs, and then by the postrevolutionary Islamic Republic); it analyzes their various reactions to Zionism from the early twentieth century, through the state years, and until the end of that period; and it analyzes the social and cultural transformations this community underwent in a relatively short period of time, growing from marginal and peripheral community into a prominent and visible one. Between Iran and Zion examines the different groups that constituted this community—for example, the Jewish communists who became prominent activists in the left-wing circles in the 1950s, or the revolutionary organizations that won the community elections in 1978 and participated in the 1979 revolution. It also sheds light on a wide range of responses to Zionism: from religious Zionism in the early 1900s to political Zionism in the 1950s, and a combination of the two from the 1970s onward. Between Iran and Zion shows the rich ethnic, social, and ideological diversity of a religious minority in Iran amid rapid transformations.

A history of epidemics and disease prevention in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Mexico, Enlightened Immunity focuses on the multiethnic and multimedia production of medical knowledge in a time when the governance of healthy populations was central to the pursuits of absolutist monarchies. The book reconstructs the cultural, ritual, and political background of Mexico’s early experiments with childhood vaccines, tracing how the public health response to epidemic disease was thoroughly enmeshed with religion and the church, the spread of Enlightenment ideas about medicine and the body, and the customs and healing practices of indigenous villages. It was not only educated urban elites—doctors and men of science—whose response to outbreaks of disease mattered. Rather, the cast of protagonists crossed ethnic, gender, and class lines: local officials who decided if and how to execute plans that came from Mexico City, rural priests who influenced local practices, peasants and artisans who reckoned with the consequences of quarantine, and Indian tributaries who decided if they would hand their children to vaccinators. By following the public response to anticontagion measures and smallpox vaccine in colonial Mexico, Enlightened Immunity sheds light on fundamental questions about trust, uncertainty, and the role of religion in a period of medical discovery, innovation, and modernization.

Today, by a number of measures, the ex-socialist economies of Central and Eastern Europe are among the most globalized in the world. This book argues that the origins of Central and Eastern Europe’s heavily transnationalized economies should be sought in their socialist past and the efforts of reformers in the 1970s and 1980s to expand ties between domestic industry and transnational corporations (TNCs). The book’s comparative-historical analysis examines the trajectories of six socialist and postsocialist economies, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia. The second part of the book focuses on the region’s deepening specialization in the 2000s as a TNC-dominated transnational manufacturing hub. It identifies three international market roles that the region’s state came to occupy in the transformation: assembly platform, intermediate producer, and combined. It explains divergence within the region through the comparative analysis of the politics of institutional adjustment after socialism.

This book is the first comparative study of Jewish communities in Western, Central, and Eastern Europe. It analyzes how Jews used social and religious spaces to reformulate patterns of fraternity, celebration, and family formation and expressions of self-identification. It suggests that the social patterns that developed between 1890 and the 1930s were formative for the fundamental reshaping of Jewish community and remain essential to our understanding of contemporary Jewish life. Focusing on the social interactions of urban European Jews, this book offers a new perspective on how Jews confronted the challenges of modernity. As membership in the official community was becoming increasingly a matter of individual choice, Jews created spaces to meet new social and emotional needs. Cafés, hotels, and restaurants became places to gather and celebrate festivals and holy days, and summer camps served as sites for the informal education of young children. These places facilitated the option of secular Jewish belonging, marking a clear distinction between Judaism and Jewishness that would have been impossible on a large scale in the pre-emancipation era. By creating new centers for Jewish life, a growing number of historical actors, including women and youth, took the process of community building into their own hands. The contexts of Jewish life expanded beyond the confines of “traditional” Jewish spaces and sometimes challenged the desires of Jewish authorities. The book further argues that these social practices remained vital in reconstructing certain Jewish communities in the wake of the devastation of the Holocaust.

This book examines the 1898 anti-Jewish riots in western and central Galicia, the Habsburg province acquired in the eighteenth century partitions of Poland and now divided between Poland and Ukraine. This volume explores how Jewish-Catholic relations functioned; how antisemitic tropes and writings gained traction at local levels even in regions with high rates of illiteracy; how the Habsburg state provided or attempted to provide stability and law and order to its far-flung provinces in the decades before World War I. At the center of interest are the choices made and actions taken on the ground by peasants, townspeople, Jews, local officials, as well as the interpretations imposed on these actions by interested parties farther removed from the scene. This book considers the new forms of political organization and virulent Catholic antisemitism that facilitated the transformation of confrontations between Catholics and Jews into a series of attacks moving from town square to village tavern while drawing ever greater numbers of people as participants in or objects of communal violence. The 1898 anti-Jewish riots and their aftermath—mass arrests, trials, political mobilization, and government and military intervention—did not simply arise from Galician backwardness. This examination of the experience of anti-Jewish violence in this rural corner of the Habsburg Monarchy is a local study of European-wide political, economic, social, and cultural transformation.

Democracy is supposed to be the antithesis of hereditary rule by family dynasties. And yet “democratic dynasties” continue to persist in democracies around the world. They have been conspicuously prevalent in Japan, where more than a third of all legislators and two-thirds of all cabinet ministers in recent years have come from families with a history in parliament. Such a high proportion of dynasties is unusual and has sparked concerns over whether democracy in Japan is functioning properly. This book introduces a comparative theory to explain the causes and consequences of dynasties in democracies like Japan. Members of dynasties enjoy an “inherited incumbency advantage” in all three stages of a typical political career: selection, election, and promotion. However, the nature and extent of this advantage, as well as its consequences for elections and representation, varies by the institutional context of electoral rules and candidate selection methods within parties. In the late 1980s, roughly half of all new candidates in Japan’s long-ruling Liberal Democratic Party were political legacies. However, electoral system reform in 1994 and subsequent party reforms have changed the incentives for party leaders to rely on dynastic politics in candidate selection. A new pattern of party-based competition is slowly replacing the old pattern of competition based on localized family fiefdoms.