Burial offerings in intramural tombs at Middle Bronze Age Megiddo

Tel Megiddo is a major type-site for the Middle Bronze in the Levant. During this period a new burial custom appeared in which the dead were interred beneath occupied houses. This tradition is well attested in Area K at the site. Area H, near the palatial complex, revealed a monumental masonry-constructed chamber tomb. This article presents the results of residue analysis conducted on ceramic vessels placed in these tombs as burial offerings. Hundreds of intramural Middle Bronze tombs with ceramic offerings were excavated in the Levant, but this is the first time the content of the vessels is revealed.     

Intimations of democratic impatience: The Book of Job

This article challenges democratic theorists’ disregard for democratic impatience by showing that the Book of Job not only defends impatience but that it intimates the merits of democratic impatience. Job is impatient along four dimensions that should speak to democratic theorists: he refuses to suffer, identifies his suffering as unjust, seeks to hold arbitrary power accountable, and recognizes patience’s irrationality in the face of injustice. Critically, I demonstrate that Job remains impatient in his mind, and thus does not abandon impatience – not even in an epilogue designed to stifle his impatient voice. While Job’s impatience is justified, it is not yet democratic, for it reneges on broader democratic claims, is not shared, and is undermined by his social privilege. I thus turn to Job’s wife – who is “Everywoman” both in a feminist and more generally democratic sense – to more fully develop a concept of democratic impatience.     

Princely entries and gift exchange in the Burgundian Low Countries: a crucial link in late medieval political culture

This article treats the first entry of a new prince as the start of a series of exchanges between the prince and his subjects. On the occasion of an entry, gifts in all kind of forms, subsistence, luxury and symbolic goods, were exchanged with the intention of establishing a bond between the new ruler and the subjects. These gifts were not standardised in the Burgundian Low Countries. There was a wide range of gifts, from wine to silverware and from money to horses. Some gifts can be linked to the princely right of lodging in places he passed on his itinerary, whereas others refer to marks of honour offered by the host. However, not all gifts were given spontaneously, but were the result of a negotiating process between the town and the prince's officials on the one hand and between the different towns of a principality on the other. Those officials benefited as well from entry gifts that trickled down to lower levels in the official hierarchy. Therefore, the gifts can be considered as personalised items in a bigger process of exchange and as a confirmation of the outcome of political negotiations.     

Muslim active citizenship in Australia: Socioeconomic challenges and the emergence of a Muslim elite

The most recent national Census demonstrated that Australian Muslims continue to occupy a socioeconomically disadvantaged position. On key indicators of unemployment rate, income, type of occupation and home ownership, Muslims consistently under-perform the national average. This pattern is evident in the last three Census data (2001, 2006 and 2011). Limited access to resources and a sense of marginalisation challenge full engagement with society and the natural growth of emotional affiliation with Australia. Muslim active citizenship is hampered by socioeconomic barriers. At the same time, an increasingly proactive class of educated Muslim elite has emerged to claim a voice for Muslims in Australia and promote citizenship rights and responsibilities.

最近的全国普查显示,澳大利亚的穆斯林仍处于社会经济的弱势地位。在诸如失业率、收入、就业类型、家居拥有等关键指标看,穆斯林一直位于国家平均水平之下。这一模式在最近三次普查（2001、2006、2011）中非常明显。获得资源渠道的有限以及边缘化感觉阻碍着他们充分参与社会,以及在情感上融入澳大利亚。穆斯林的公民意识受困于社会经济障碍。与此同时,也出现了一班受到良好教育的穆斯林精英,这个积极进取的阶层开始为澳大利亚的穆斯林代言,促进他们的公民权利和义务。     

A stage and eclectic approach to industrial district development: two policy keys for ‘survival’ clusters in developing countries

This article analyses the history of Italian industrial districts (IDs) to identify lessons to help small and medium‐sized enterprise (SME) clusters in developing countries to move to higher stages of development. Transforming the 1990 seminal work of Brusco on distinct models of SME clustering into a stage approach, this article identifies a sequence of different maturity stages which the IDs passed through: initial craft production; industrialization through large firms; the fragmentation of production followed by the growth of smaller specialized units; and, finally, new routes to innovation and competitiveness. These phases help explain how development is a stage process which needs to be carefully considered and not rushed, through attempting to cross too many stages at once. Realistic steps are always necessary to create an effective base for growth. Furthermore, a theoretical framework is presented, which identifies three factorial levels that have intervened in the ID development process over the past 50 years. Economic, policy and social factors are identified and presented as drivers that work together to produce the structural changes that explain an effective development process. The final section emphasizes the relevance that this kind of analysis can have on the policy‐making schemes being applied in developing countries, with special reference to less developed types of clusters.     

Not Just a Jesuit Atlas of China: Qing Imperial Cartography and Its European Connections

In the literature, the ‘Overview Maps of Imperial Territories’ or Huangyu quanlan tu 皇輿全覽圖, is mostly referred to as ‘the Jesuit atlas of China’. The reason is that this early eighteenth-century atlas of all Qing China’s territories plus Korea and Tibet is assumed to have resulted from European missionaries importing European cartographic practices. In this essay, I argue that this view is outdated and can no longer be sustained. By revisiting the background of the missionaries’ involvement in cartographic exchanges between Asia and Europe, the techniques used for surveying Qing territories and the production of the resulting atlases, I show that the mapping project behind the ‘Overview Maps of Imperial Territories’ is best understood as a creative answer to the unique needs of Qing frontier management and imperial control, made possible by the integration, in mensurational and in representational terms, of European and East Asian cartographic practices.     

Restituting Church Buildings and Negotiating Church Factions： Missionary Mapmakers and the Making of Local Networks （1712-1716）

At the turn of the 18th century, the Kangxi emperor initiated a large project to map the vast territories of the Qing. The land surveys that ensued were executed by teams of Qing officials and European missionaries, most of them French Jesuits first sent to China in 1685 and actively supported by the French crown. Early 18th century Jesuit publications foster a much-heralded claim that these missionary-mapmakers drew on their status of imperial envoys during the surveys to locally advance the position of the Catholic church. This article strives to explore the format/on of such local networks by these missionaries as they passed through the cities and towns of the Chinese provinces. On the basis of archival material, details emerge of contacts with local Qing administrators and Chinese Christians, and of attempts to purchase and recover local churches. This is then discussed against the background of the Rites Controversy, in an attempt to evaluate how such local networks relate to the rivalry between missionaries of different orders. The article emphasizes that there was （and perhaps is） no such thing as ＂pure science＂ by underscoring that important technical achievements such as the Qing mapping project are often shaped by complex networks and historical contingencies.