Open Access Books

This volume presents new topics from Chinese history of the last 1400 years from a broad range of fields such as politics, religion, society, economy and culture. The refreshing eight articles give new insights on events as different as the inter-religious court debates of the Tang, the Jiaqing reform of the Qing, the China display on the Chicago World Fair in 1893, Christianity and state-building in Chaozhou, the Taiwan salt trade, Chinese indentured labour in World War I in France, China’s rise and current internet regulation. This book highlights the complexity of multi-level interaction of different agents in the center and periphery of China, inside and outside China, contributing to intellectual debates, political and social dynamics, economy structure, modernization, identity building and interaction with the outside.

In the aftermath of 9/11 Islamic seminaries or madrasas received much media attention in India, mostly owing to the alleged link between madrasa education and forms of violence. Yet, while ample information on madrasas for boys is available, similar institutions of Islamic learning for girls have for the greater part escaped public attention so far. This study investigates how madrasas for girls emerged in India, how they differ from madrasas for boys, and how female students come to interpret Islam through the teachings they receive in these schools. Observations suggest that, next to the official curriculum, the ‘informal’ curriculum plays an equally important role. It serves the madrasa’s broader aim of bringing about a complete reform of the students’ morality and to determine their actions accordingly.

Film Architecture and the Transnational Imagination presents for the first time a comparative study of European film set design in the late 1920s and 1930s; based on a wealth of designers’ drawings, film stills and archival documents, the book offers a new insight into the development and significance of trans-national artistic collaboration during this period. European cinema from the late 1920s to the late 1930s is famous for its attention to detail in terms of set design and visual effect. Focusing on developments in Britain, France, and Germany, Film Architecture and the Transnational Imagination: Set Design in 1930s European Cinema provides a comprehensive analysis of the practices, styles, and function of cinematic production design during this period, and its influence on subsequent filmmaking patterns.

The family lives of immigrants and ethnic minority populations have become central to arguments about the right and wrong ways of living in multicultural societies. While the characteristic cultural practices of such families have long been scrutinized by the media and policy makers, these groups themselves are beginning to reflect on how to manage their family relationships. Exploring case studies from Austria, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and Australia, The Family in Question explores how those in public policy often dangerously reflect the popular imagination, rather than recognizing the complex changes taking place within the global immigrant community.

This book argues that using social capital to eradicate poverty is less likely to succeed because the mainstream neoinstitutional approach mistakenly assumes that social capital necessarily benefits poor people. This inadequacy calls for a re-assessment of human motivations, institutional dynamics and structural complexity in social capital building. Using ethnographic and participatory methods, this book calls for an exploration of ‘unseen’ social capital which is intended to challenge the mainstream understanding of ‘seen’ social capital. As such this book is useful to policy makers and practitioners.

This remarkable title describes the life of one of Holland’s most remarkable figures: medical practitioner Van Dieren (1861-1940), Amsterdammer and prolific writer who caused quite a stir in his days. The author recounts the life and times of Van Dieren in the form of a series of narratives about the fights of this Dutch Don Quixote with his particular windmills. Individual chapters deal with his life, work, personal style, friendships and enmities, his discussions with psychoanalysts, socialists, scientists and above all of his tragic-comical failures. Unique source material is used to reconstruct this picture, such as the correspondence between Van Dieren and a large number of well-known Dutchmen, including novelist Van Eeden, Nobel laureate C.Eijkman, the philosopher Bolland, politician De Savornin Lohman, Queen Emma, and many others. Marginality and non-conformity are the key themes that run through the life of this observer which made him one of the most successful failures in Dutch history.

In the face of renewed competition from Hollywood since the early 1980s and the challenges posed to Europe’s national cinemas by the fall of the Wall in 1989, independent filmmaking in Europe has begun to re-invent itself. European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood re-assesses the different debates and presents a broader framework for understanding the forces at work since the 1960s. These include the interface of “world cinema” and the rise of Asian cinemas, the importance of the international film festival circuit, the role of television, as well as the changing aesthetics of auteur cinema. New audiences have different allegiances, and new technologies enable networks to reshape identities, but European cinema still has an important function in setting critical and creative agendas, even as its economic and institutional bases are in transition.

This study explores the theme of Batavian ethnicity and ethnogenesis in the context of the Early Roman Empire, starting with the current view of ethnicity as a culturally determined, subjective construct shaped through interaction with an ethnic ‘other’. The study analyses literary, epigraphic and archaeological sources relating to the Batavian image and self-image against the background of the specific integration of the Batavian community into the Roman world. The Batavian society was exploited by the Roman authorities for the recruitment of auxiliary soldiers. As a result it developed into a full-blown military community. The study’s main conclusion is that Rome exerted a profound influence on the formation of the Batavians both as a political entity and as an ethnic group. The combination of an explicit theoretical framework and a clear presentation of empirical data makes this book an indispensable work for all those interested in ethnicity and ethnogenesis in the context of the Roman Empire.

The introduction of English as a medium of instruction (EMI) has changed higher education enormously in many European countries. This development is increasingly encapsulated under the term Englishization, that is, the increasing dispersion of English as a means of communication in non-Anglophone contexts. Englishization is not undisputed: legal challenges have arisen in several countries. Nor is it uniform; universities across Europe embrace Englishization, but they do so in their own way. In this volume, authors from 15 European countries present analyses from a range of perspectives coalescing around core concerns: the quality of education, cultural identity, inequality of opportunities and access, questions of justice and democracy, and internationalization and language policy. This book will appeal to researchers in applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, educational sciences, and political science, as well as policy makers and people with a concern about the direction of higher education.

Why did some economies experience a boom in the 1990s? Employment ‘Miracles’ comparatively analyses select miracle economies. The contributors to the volume critically analyze how the small size and institutional structure of seven countries like the Netherlands, Denmark and Ireland accounted for their success and status as economic models. Comparisons with the American and German markets reveal how differing policies – liberal versus corporatist/social democratic – determine job growth and levels of income inequality and poverty. The book also stresses the explanatory relevance of lucky circumstances such as the housing price bubble. Employment ‘Miracles’ is an important resource for political scientists and economists in their study of employment development.

In all advanced Western nations, policy-makers have implemented encompassing welfare state reforms in recent decades breaking with past welfare arrangements. In particular, social democracy engaged in significant policy change under the Third Way paradigm and broke with its traditional reputation on welfare that had built the ties with the core constituency in the 20th century. The Electoral Consequences of Third Way Welfare State Reforms: Social Democracy’s Transformation and its Political Costs provides a comparative study of the electoral consequences of Third Way welfare state reforms. The book demonstrates that Third Way reforms went against the social policy preferences of social democracy’s core voters and indeed produced an electoral setback for social democrats at the ballots. Moreover, and accounting for cross-national variation, the analysis shows that the nature of the setback is contingent on the electoral system and the party competition social democrats face when reforming the welfare state.

The nature of immigrant entrepreneurship is changing in Dutch society. Nowadays, many immigrant entrepreneurs start businesses in producer and personal services instead of more traditional sectors such as retail or hotel and catering. At the same time, a growing number of second-generation immigrants are setting up their own firms in the Netherlands. These second-generation immigrants-born and/or raised in the receiving country-are following different trajectories in comparison with first-generation immigrant entrepreneurs, indeed displaying a move away from traditional immigrant niches. Yet studies on second-generation immigrant entrepreneurs remain limited in both the Dutch and international literature on this subject. This study presents one of the first explicit comparisons between first and second-generation self-employed immigrants. The embeddedness of immigrants in local and transnational networks and the dynamics of the markets in which these entrepreneurs are active are examined based on in-depth interviews with immigrant entrepreneurs in Dutch cities. In doing so, this study provides a vivid, longitudinal view of first and second-generation immigrant entrepreneurs, their incorporation into Dutch society, their businesses and business development(s).

In many scholarly disciplines, books – not articles – are the norm. As print runs become smaller, the question arises whether publishing monographs in open access helps to make their contents globally accessible. To answer this question, the results of multiple studies on the usage of open access books are presented. The research focuses on three areas: economic viability; optimization of open access monographs infrastructure and measuring the effects of open access in terms of scholarly impact and societal influence. Each chapter reviews a different aspect: book sales, digital dissemination, open licenses, user communities, measuring usage, developing countries and the effects on citations and social media.

Much has been written on the post-war decolonisation in the Caribbean, but rarely from a truly comparative perspective, and seldom with serious attention to the former Dutch colonies of Surinam, the Netherlands Antilles and Aruba. This study bridges both gaps. In their analysis of Dutch decolonisation policies since the 1940s, the authors discuss not only political processes, but also development aid, the Dutch Caribbean exodus to the metropolis and cultural antagonisms. A balance is drawn both of the costs and benefits of independence in the Caribbean and of the outlines and results of the policies pursued in the non-sovereign Caribbean by France, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and the United States.

In the seventeenth century, almost every stage performance was accompanied by music. Music was not only played between the companies, but also in the play itself. Music served as a background and decoration and was functionally integrated in the act of drama. The accounts of the Amsterdamse Schouwburg show that they employed professional musicians; in addition, the actors sang and danced. Following on from foreign stage music studies, this book focuses extensively on seventeenth-century theater music in the Netherlands for the first time. The centerpiece is the stage poet Jan Harmensz Krul, who skillfully interweaved music into his plays and who founded the Amsterdam Musyck room in 1634 – a foundation devoted entirely to the combination of poetry and music on stage. On the basis of five characteristic musical scenes from his work (the watchman scene, prison scene, serenade, sacrificial scene and sleep scene), an image is sketched of the Amsterdam theater music practice at the time. Such musical scenes were also loved by other stage poets, at home and abroad. They had a signaling function for the audience: they were immediately recognizable situations, benchmarks in the drama, which were associated with music by default. Poets varied to their heart’s content. For the playwright and spectator, those stereotypical musical scenes were what music was for the characters in the plays: an effective means of manipulation – a perfect seduction, of eye, ear and heart.

Il rythmus caudatus continens è una tipologia metrica attestata nel Medioevo dalle Artes rythmicae latine e diffusa nelle letterature francese, provenzale, italiana e catalana, in un periodo che va dal XII al XV secolo e oltre. Pur senza costituire un genere letterario, i testi scritti in rythmus caudatus continens presentano, nelle diverse letterature, importanti somiglianze tematiche. Questo libro offre una sintesi della circolazione del metro partendo dallo studio dei testi composti nell’area galloromanza, che intreccia analisi metrico-stilistica, contenutistica e filologica. Vengono così descritte le costanti e i punti di snodo della tradizione, e presentate delle ipotesi sul modo in cui il rythmus caudatus continens è stato trasmesso alle letterature italiana e catalana, costituendosi in tal modo come un elemento importante della coesione del sistema letterario europeo del Medioevo.