The Anthropology of Development and Globalization or The Greek Wars

The Anthropology of Development and Globalization

Author: Marc Edelman

Development — is it a powerful vision of a better life for the half of the world’s population who subsist on two dollars a day? Or is it a failed Enlightenment legacy, an oppressive 'master narrative'? Such questions inspire a field newly animated by theories of globalization, modernity, cultural hybridity, and transnationalism. The Anthropology of Development and Globalization is a collection of readings that provides an unprecedented overview of this field that ranges from its classical origins to today’s debates about the 'magic' of the free market.

The volume is framed by an encyclopedic introduction that will prove indispensable to students and experts alike. Subsequent readings range from classics by Weber and Marx and Engels to contemporary works on the politics of development knowledge, consumption, environment, gender, international NGO networks, the International Monetary Fund, campaigns to reform the World Bank, the collapse of socialism, and the limits of “post-developmentalism.” Explicitly designed for teaching, The Anthropology of Development and Globalization fills a crucial gap; no other available text so richly mingles historical, cultural, political, and economic perspectives on development and globalization, and none captures such a wide variety of theoretical approaches and topics as does this exciting collection.

Book about: Plain Lives in a Golden Age or Travel Perspectives

The Greek Wars: The Failure of Persia

Author: George Cawkwell

The Greek Wars treats the whole course of Persian relations with the Greeks from the coming of Cyrus in the 540s down to Alexander the Great's defeat of Darius III in 331 BC. Cawkwell discusses from a Persian perspective major questions such as why Xerxes' invasion of Greece failed, and how important a part the Great King played in Greek affairs in the fourth century. Cawkwell's views are at many points original: in particular, his explanation of how and why the Persian invasion of Greece failed challenges the prevailing orthodoxy, as does his view of the importance of Persia in Greek affairs for the two decades after the King's Peace. Persia, he concludes, was destroyed by Macedonian military might but moral decline had no part in it; the Macedonians who had subjected Greece were too good an army, but their victory was not easy.

Table of Contents:

1. Introduction

2. The subjection of the Greeks of Asia

3. `The lands beyond the sea'

4. The Ionian Revolt

5. The conquest of Greece

6. The war in the East Aegean

7. Peace with Athens, 449-412 BC

8. The recovery of the Greeks of Asia

9. From the King's Peace to the end of the Social War

10. The end of the Achaemenids