The end of the 16th century saw Dutch expansion in Asia, as The Dutch East India Company (the VOC) was fast becoming an Asian power, both political and economic. By 1669, the VOC was the richest private company the world had ever seen. This landmark study looks at perhaps the most important tool in the Company' trading - its ships. In order to reconstruct the complete shipping activities of the…
How are intergenerational relationships playing out in the digital rhythms of the household? Through extensive fieldwork in Tokyo, Shanghai and Melbourne, this book ethnographically explores how households are being understood, articulated and defined by digital media practices. It explores the rise of self-tracking, quantified self and informal practices of care at distance as part of contempo…
Historical demographers since Malthus have characterized the West-European and Chinese demographic regimes as systems under low and high pressure, respectively. This volume examines the operation of the positive check at the two ends of the Eurasian continent by taking the Netherlands and Taiwan as representatives of the West-European and Chinese mortality regimes. Are these cases as different …
Today we are witnessing an increased use of data visualization in society. Across domains such as work, education and the news, various forms of graphs, charts and maps are used to explain, convince and tell stories. In an era in which more and more data are produced and circulated digitally, and digital tools make visualization production increasingly accessible, it is important to study the c…
Der gegenwärtige Diskurs um den Umbau des Sozialstaates wird von Finanzierungs- und Leistungsaspekten dominiert. Fragen der Prinzipien, nach denen die Sicherungssysteme gestaltet sind oder gestaltet werden sollen, treten demgegenüber meist in den Hintergrund. Die vorliegende Studie versucht hier eine Lücke zu schließen: An historischem Material - von der Konstitution bis zur großen Reform …
The volume examines complex intersections of environmental conditions, geopolitical tensions and local innovative reactions characterising ‘the Arctic’ in the early twenty-first century. What happens in the region (such as permafrost thaw or methane release) not only sweeps rapidly through local ecosystems but also has profound global implications. Bringing together a unique combination of …
This title draws on Strathern‚Äôs interest in the reification of social relations. If the world is shrinking in terms of resources and their access, it is expanding in terms of new candidates for proprietorship. How new relations come into being is among the many questions about property, ownership, and knowledge brought together here. Twenty years have not diminished interest in the book 
Since the early nineteenth century, numerous campaigns have denounced the mistreatment of animals.Originally published in French as La cause animale, this book compares the British and French histories of the animal-protection movement to retrace its origins and assess its impact up to the present day. As Christophe Traïni shows, the struggle for animal rights—inextricably linked to the rise…
Traditionally, the Netherlands has enjoyed being a test market for many ideas in the media. But over the last decade, progress has been severely hampered by lengthy discussions on the future structure of just one sector of media, namely public broadcasting via radio and television. The narrow approach results in a lot of paper, speeches and theories, but little in the way of definitive policy m…
In recent years, new and established media have penetrated, challenged, and often surpassed in significance traditional institutions of socialization and education. Moreover, the social organization of knowledge production and distribution has become highly mediated through increasingly complex combinations of information and communication technologies. The papers in this volume are exploring i…