A novel theory of how technological revolutions affect the rise and fall of great powers When scholars and policymakers consider how technological advances affect the rise and fall of great powers, they draw on theories that center the moment of innovation the eureka moment that sparks astonishing technological feats. In this book, Jeffrey Ding offers a different explanation of how technological revolutions affect competition among great powers. Rather than focusing on which state first introduced major innovations, he investigates why some states were more successful than others at adapting and embracing new technologies at scale. Drawing on historical case studies of past industrial revolutions as well as statistical analysis, Ding develops a theory that emphasizes institutional adaptations oriented around diffusing technological advances throughout the entire economy.Examining Britain s rise to preeminence in the First Industrial Revolution, America and Germany s overtaking of Britain in the Second
In 1905 President Teddy Roosevelt dispatched Secretary of War William Taft, his gun-toting daughter Alice and a gaggle of congressmen on a mission to Japan, the Philippines, China, and Korea. There, they would quietly forge a series of agreements that divided up Asia. At the time, Roosevelt was bully-confident about America's future on the continent. But these secret pacts lit the fuse that would, decades later, result in a number of devastating wars: WWII, the Korean War, and the communist revolution in China. One hundred years later, James Bradley retraces that epic voyage and discovers the remarkable truth about America's vast imperial past - and its world-shaking consequences. Full of fascinating characters and brilliantly told, THE IMPERIAL CRUISE will forever reshape the way we understand U.S. history.
Satire as a distinct genre of writing was first developed bythe Romans in the second century BCE. Regarded by them as uniquely'their own', satire held a special place in the Roman imaginationas the one genre that could address the problems of city life fromthe perspective of a 'real Roman'. In this Cambridge Companion aninternational team of scholars provides a stimulating introductionto Roman satire's core practitioners and practices, placing themwithin the contexts of Greco-Roman literary and political history.Besides addressing basic questions of authors, content, and form,the volume looks to the question of what satire 'does' within theworld of Greco-Roman social exchanges, and goes on to treat thegenre's further development, reception, and translation inElizabethan England and beyond. Included are studies of theprosimetric, 'Menippean' satires that would become the models ofRabelais, Erasmus, More, and (narrative satire's crowning jewel)Swift.
This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the Asia Information Retrieval Symposium, AIRS 2004, held in Beijing, China, in October 2004. The 28 revised full papers presented have passed through two rounds of reviewing and improvement and were selected from 106 papers submitted. All current issues in information retrieval are addressed, ranging from algorithmic and methodological issues to application in various fields. Particular emphasis is given to aspects of Asian languages; text retrieval and Web information retrieval are addressed in several papers.
