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This book weaves together historical narrative and quantitative bibliometric data to detail the path financial economists took in order to form one of the central theories of financial economics—the influential efficient-market hypothesis—which states that the behavior of financial markets is unpredictable. As the notorious quip goes, a blindfolded monkey would do better than a group of experts in selecting a portfolio of securities, simply by throwing darts at the financial pages of a newspaper. How did such a hypothesis come to be so influential in the field of financial economics? How did financial economists turn a lack of evidence about systematic patterns in the behavior of financial markets into a foundational approach to the study of finance? Each chapter focuses on these questions, as well as on collaborative academic networks, and on the values and affects that kept the networks together as they struggled to define what the new field of financial economics should be about. In doing so, the book introduces a new dimension—data analysis—to our understanding of the ways knowledge advances.

Over nearly two decades during which they have each been conducting fieldwork in the Arabian Peninsula, the authors have regularly encountered exoticizing and exceptionalist discourses about the region and its people, political systems, and prevalent cultural practices. These persistent encounters became the springboard for the book, a reflection on conducting fieldwork within a “field” that is marked by such representations. The book's focus is on deconstructing the exceptionalist representations that circulate about the Arabian Peninsula. It analyzes what exceptionalism does, how it is used by various people, and how it helps shape power relations in the societies studied. The book proposes ways that this analysis of exceptionalism provides tools for rethinking the concepts that have become commonplace, structuring narratives and analytical frameworks within fieldwork in and on the Arabian Peninsula. It asks: What would not only Middle East studies, but studies of postcolonial societies and global capitalism in other parts of the world look like if the Arabian Peninsula was central, rather than peripheral or exceptional, to ongoing sociohistorical processes and representational practices? The book explores how the exceptionalizing discourses that permeate Arabian Peninsula studies spring from colonialist discourses still operative in anthropology and sociology more generally, and suggest that de-exceptionalizing the region within their disciplines can offer opportunities for decolonized knowledge production.

This book seeks to explain why great powers adopt such different strategies to protect their oil access from politically motivated disruptions. In extreme cases, such as Imperial Japan in 1941, great powers fought wars to grab oil territory in anticipation of a potential embargo by the Allies; in other instances, such as Germany in the early Nazi period, states chose relatively subdued measures like, oil alliances or domestic policies, to conserve oil. What accounts for this variation? Fundamentally, it is puzzling that great powers fear oil coercion at all because the global market makes oil sanctions very difficult to enforce. This book argues that two variables determine what strategy a great power will adopt: the petroleum deficit, which measures how much oil the state produces domestically compared to what it needs for its strategic objectives; and disruptibility, which estimates the susceptibility of a state's oil imports to military interdiction—that is, blockade. Because global markets undercut the effectiveness of oil sanctions, blockade is in practice the only true threat to great power oil access. That, combined with the devastating consequences of oil deprivation to a state's military power, explains why states fear oil coercion deeply despite the adaptive functions of the market. Together, these two variables predict a state's coercive vulnerability, which determines how willing the state will be to accept the costs and risks attendant on various potential strategies. Only those great powers with large deficits and highly disruptible imports will adopt the most extreme strategy: direct control of oil through territorial conquest.

This book is a call to reconsider the epistemic violence that is committed when scholars, policymakers, and the general public continue to frame Black precarity as just another racial, cultural, or ethnic conflict that can be solved solely through legal, political, or economic means. This book argues that the historical and material production of blackness-as-risk is foundational to the historical and material construction of our society and certainly foundational to the construction and experience of metropolitan space. The book also considers how an ethics of lived blackness—living fully and visibly in the face of forces intended to dehumanize and erase—can create a powerful counter point to blackness-as-risk. Using a transdisciplinary methodology, the book studies cultural, institutional, and spatial politics of race in North St. Louis County, Missouri, as a set of practices that are intimately connected to each other and to global histories of race and race-making. As such, it adds important insight into the racialization of metropolitan space and people in the United States. The arguments presented in the book draw from fifteen years of engaged research in North St. Louis County and rely on multiple disciplinary perspectives and local knowledge in order to study relationships between interconnected practices and phenomena.

This book offers a radical reassessment of the modern European literary canon. The book's reinterpretations of Goethe, Schiller, Büchner, Döblin, Musil, and Kafka show how literary and scientific narratives have determined each other over the past three centuries, and it argues that modern literature not only contributed to the development of the human sciences but also established itself as the privileged medium for a modern style of case-based reasoning. The book traces the role of narrative fiction in relation to the scientific knowledge of the individual from eighteenth-century psychology and pedagogy to nineteenth-century sexology and criminology to twentieth-century psychoanalysis. The book demonstrates how modern authors consciously engaged casuistic forms of writing to arrive at new understandings of literary discourse that correspond to major historical transformations in the function of fiction. It argues for the centrality of literature to changes in the conceptions of psychological knowledge production around 1800; legal responsibility and institutionalized forms of decision-making throughout the nineteenth century; and literature's own realist demands in the early twentieth century.

This book provides the first in-depth study of an ethnic minority region during the first decade of the People's Republic of China: the Amdo region in the Sino-Tibetan borderland. Employing previously inaccessible local archives as well as other rare primary sources, the book demonstrates that the Communist Party's goal in 1950s Amdo was not just state-building, but also nation-building. Such an objective required the construction of narratives and policies capable of convincing Tibetans of their membership in a wider political community. As the book shows, however, early efforts to gradually and organically transform a vast multiethnic empire into a singular nation-state lost out to a revolutionary impatience, demanding more immediate paths to national integration and socialist transformation. This led in 1958 to communization, then to large-scale rebellion and its brutal pacification. Rather than joining voluntarily, Amdo was integrated through the widespread, often indiscriminate use of violence, a violence that lingers in the living memory of Amdo Tibetans and others.

This book links key events in Chicago's development, from its marshy origins in the 1600s to today's robust metropolis. The book presents Chicago in terms of the people whose lives made the city–from the tycoons and the politicians to the hundreds of thousands of immigrants from all over the world. This revised and updated second edition brings Chicago's story into the twenty-first century, as it reviews the colorful and dramatic panorama of the city's explosive past. How did the pungent swamplands that the Native Americans called “the wild-garlic place” burgeon into one of the world's largest and most sophisticated cities? What is the real story behind the Great Chicago Fire? What aspects of American industry exploded with the bomb in Haymarket Square? Could the gritty blue-collar hometown of Al Capone become a visionary global city? A city of immigrants and entrepreneurs, Chicago is quintessentially American. The book brings it to life and highlights the key people, moments, and special places–from Fort Dearborn to Cabrini-Green, Marquette to Mayor Daley, the Union Stock Yards to the Chicago Bulls–that make this incredible city, the book claims, one of the best places in the world.

This personal and frank book offers an insider's view on the violent confrontations in Charlottesville during the “summer of hate.” Blending memoir, courtroom drama, and a consideration of the unhealed wound of racism in our society, the book shines a light on the conflict between the value of free speech and the protection of civil rights. The author has spent his career in the thick of these tempestuous and fraught issues, from acting as lead counsel in a famous Supreme Court decision challenging Virginia's law against burning crosses, to serving as co-counsel in a libel suit brought by a fraternity against Rolling Stone magazine for publishing an article alleging that one of the fraternity's initiation rituals included gang rape. The author has also been active as a university leader, serving as dean of three law schools and president of one and railing against hate speech and sexual assault on US campuses. Well before the tiki torches cast their ominous shadows across the nation, the city of Charlottesville sought to relocate the Unite the Right rally; the author was approached to represent the alt-right groups. Though the author declined, he came to wonder what his history of advocacy had wrought. Feeling unsettlingly complicit, the author joined the Charlottesville Task Force, and realized that the events that transpired there had meaning and resonance far beyond a singular time and place. Why, he wonders, has one of our foundational rights created a land in which such tragic clashes happen all too frequently?

This book explores the nature of national humiliation and its impact on foreign policy. The book demonstrates that Germany's catastrophic reaction to humiliation at the end of World War I is part of a broader pattern: states that experience humiliating events are more likely to engage in international aggression aimed at restoring the state's image in its own eyes and in the eyes of others. The book shows that these states also pursue conquest, intervene in the affairs of other states, engage in diplomatic hostility and verbal discord, and pursue advanced weaponry and other symbols of national resurgence at higher rates than non-humiliated states in similar foreign policy contexts. The book's examination of how national humiliation functions at the individual level explores leaders' domestic incentives to evoke a sense of national humiliation. As a result of humiliation on this level, the effects may persist for decades, if not centuries, following the original humiliating event.

This book details the new forms of workers' protest and opposition that have developed as Japan's economy has transformed over the past three decades and highlights their impact upon the country's policymaking process. Drawing on a new dataset charting protest events from the 1980s to the present, the book produces the first systematic study of Japan's new precarious labor movement. It details the movement's rise during Japan's post-bubble economic transformation and highlights the different and innovative forms of dissent that mark the end of the country's famously non-confrontational industrial relations. In doing so, moreover, the book shows how this new pattern of industrial and social tension is reflected within the country's macroeconomic policymaking, resulting in a new policy dissensus that has consistently failed to offer policy reforms that would produce a return to economic growth. As a result, the book argues that the Japanese model of capitalism has therefore become increasingly disorganized.

This book features fourteen chapters that track changes in the ways Americans have perceived the Latter-day Saints since the 1830s. From presidential politics, to political violence, to the definition of marriage, to the meaning of sexual equality—the book places Mormons in larger American histories of territorial expansion, religious mission, Constitutional interpretation, and state formation. The chapters also show that the political support of the Latter-day Saints has proven, at critical junctures, valuable to other political groups. The willingness of Americans to accept Latter-day Saints as full participants in the United States political system has ranged over time and been impelled by political expediency, granting Mormons in the United States an ambiguous status, contingent on changing political needs and perceptions.

This book draws attention to the impact of flexible scheduling on managerial power and workplace control. When we understand paid work as a power relationship, the book argues, we see how the spread of precarious scheduling constitutes flexible despotism; a novel regime of control within the workplace. The author of the book believes that flexible despotism represents a new domain of inequality, in which the postindustrial working class increasingly suffers a scheduling nightmare. By investigating two of the largest retailers in the world, the book uncovers how control in the contemporary “flexible firm” is achieved through the insidious combination of “flexible discipline” and “schedule gifts.” Flexible discipline provides managers with an arbitrary means by which to punish workers, but flexible scheduling also requires workers to actively win favor with managers in order to receive “schedule gifts”: more or better hours. The book concludes that the centrality of precarious scheduling to control means that for those at the bottom of the postindustrial labor market, the future of work will increasingly be one of flexible despotism.

This book traces how intermedial experiments shape modernist texts from 1900 to 1950. Considering literature alongside painting, sculpture, photography, and film, the book examines how these arts inflect narrative movement, contribute to plot events, and configure poetry and memoir. As forms and formal theories cross from one artistic realm to another and back again, modernism shows its obsession with form—and even at times becomes a formalism itself—but as the book states, that form is far more dynamic than we have given it credit for. Form fulfills such various functions that we cannot characterize it as a mere container for content or matter, nor can we consign it to ignominy opposite historicism or political commitment. As a structure or scheme that enables action, form in modernism can be plastic, protean, or even fragile, and works by Henry James, Virginia Woolf, Mina Loy, Evelyn Waugh, and Gertrude Stein demonstrate the range of form's operations. Revising three major formal paradigms—spatial form, pure form, and formlessness—and recasting the history of modernist form, the book proposes an understanding of form as a verbal category, as a kind of doing. It thus opens new possibilities for conversation between modernist studies and formalist studies and simultaneously promotes a capacious rethinking of the convergence between literary modernism and creative work in other media.

How do you prove that you're Muslim? This is not a question that most believers ever have to ask themselves, and yet for members of India's Ahmadiyya Muslim Community, it poses an existential challenge. The Ahmadis are the minority of a minority—people for whom simply being Muslim is a challenge. They must constantly ask the question: What evidence could ever be sufficient to prove that I belong to the faith? This book explores how a need to respond to this question shapes the lives of Ahmadis in Qadian in northern India. Qadian was the birthplace of the Ahmadiyya community's founder, and it remains a location of huge spiritual importance for members of the community around the world. Nonetheless, it has been physically separated from the Ahmadis' spiritual leader—the caliph—since partition, and the believers who live there now and act as its guardians must confront daily the reality of this separation even while attempting to make their Muslimness verifiable. By exploring the centrality of this separation to the ethics of everyday life in Qadian, the book presents a new model for the academic study of religious doubt, one that is not premised on a concept of belief but instead captures the richness with which people might experience problematic relationships to truth.

This book demonstrates how anticommunist political projects were critical to the United States' expanding imperial power in the age of decolonization, and how anticommunism was essential to the growing global economy of imperial violence in the Cold War era. The book shows how, in the mid-twentieth-century Philippines, U.S. policymakers and Filipino elites promoted the islands as a model colony. In the wake of World War II, as the decolonization movement strengthened, those same political actors pivoted and, after Philippine independence in 1946, lauded the archipelago as a successful postcolonial democracy. Despite elite propaganda, from the early 1930s to late 1950s, radical movements in the Philippines highlighted U.S. hegemony over the new Republic of the Philippines and, in so doing, threatened American efforts to separate the US from sordid histories of empire, imperialism, and the colonial racial order. The book finds that in order to justify U.S. intervention in an ostensibly independent Philippine nation, anticommunist Filipinos and their American allies transformed local political struggles in the Philippines into sites of resistance against global communist revolution. By linking political struggles over local resources to a war against communism, American and Filipino anticommunists legitimized the use of violence as a means to capture and contain alternative forms of political, economic, and social organization. Placing the post-World War II history of anticommunism in the Philippines within a larger imperial framework, the book illustrates how American and Filipino intelligence agents, military officials, paramilitaries, state bureaucrats, academics, and entrepreneurs mobilized anticommunist politics to contain challenges to elite rule in the Philippines.

This sweeping history shows how the Greek Orthodox Church in America has functioned as much more than a religious institution, becoming the focal point in the lives of the country's million-plus Greek immigrants and their descendants. Assuming the responsibility of running Greek-language schools and encouraging local parishes to engage in cultural and social activities, the church became the most important Greek American institution and shaped the identity of Greeks in the United States. The book digs into these traditional activities, highlighting the American church's dependency on the “mother church,” the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Constantinople, and the use of Greek language in the Sunday liturgy. Today, as this rich biography of the church shows us, Greek Orthodoxy remains in between the Old World and the New, both Greek and American.

This book collects the central writings by Hans Blumenberg and covers topics such as on the philosophy of language, metaphor theory, non-conceptuality, aesthetics, politics, and literary studies. The book demonstrates Blumenberg's intellectual breadth and gives an overview of his thematic and stylistic range over four decades. Blumenberg's early philosophy of technology becomes tangible, as does his critique of linguistic perfectibility and conceptual thought, his theory of history as successive concepts of reality, his anthropology, or his studies of literature. The book allows readers to discover a master thinker whose role in the German intellectual post-war scene can hardly be overestimated.

This revealing look at home care illustrates how elderly and disabled people and the immigrant women workers who assist them in daily activities develop meaningful relationships even when their different ages, abilities, races, nationalities, and socioeconomic backgrounds generate tension. As the book shows, workers can experience devaluation within racialized and gendered class hierarchies, which shapes their pursuit of security. The book analyzes the tensions, alliances, and compromises between security for workers and flexibility for elderly and disabled people, and argues that workers and recipients negotiate flexibility and security within intersecting inequalities in varying ways depending on multiple interacting dynamics. What comes through from the book's analysis is the need for deeply democratic alliances across multiple axes of inequality. To support both flexible care and secure work, the book argues for an intimate community unionism that advocates for universal state funding, designs culturally sensitive labor market intermediaries run by workers and recipients to help people find jobs or workers, and addresses everyday tensions in home workplaces.

Why are some territorial partitions accepted as the appropriate borders of a nation's homeland, whereas in other places conflict continues despite or even because of division of territory? This book develops a theory of what homelands are that acknowledges both their importance in domestic and international politics and their change over time. These changes, the book argues, are driven by domestic political competition and help explain the variation in whether partitions resolve conflict. The book also provides systematic, comparable data about the homeland status of lost territory over time that allow it to bridge the persistent gap between constructivist theories of nationalism and positivist empirical analyses of international relations.

Through a fascinating discussion of religion's role in the rhetoric of American civilizing empire, this book undertakes an exploration of how Catholic mission histories served as a useful reference for Americans narrating U.S. settler colonialism on the North American continent and seeking to extend military, political, and cultural power around the world. The book traces historical celebrations of Catholic missionary histories in the upper Midwest, Southern California, and the U.S. colonial Philippines to demonstrate the improbable centrality of the Catholic missions to ostensibly Protestant imperial endeavors. The book shows that, as the United States built its continental and global dominion and an empire of production and commerce in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, Protestant and Catholic Americans began to celebrate Catholic imperial pasts. The book demonstrates that American Protestants joined their Catholic compatriots in speaking with admiration about historical Catholic missionaries. Comparing them favorably to the Puritans, Pilgrims, and the American Revolutionary generation, commemorators drew these missionaries into a cross-confessional pantheon of U.S. national and imperial founding fathers. In the process, they cast Catholic missionaries as gentle and effective agents of conquest, uplift, and economic growth, arguing that they could serve as both origins and models for an American civilizing empire. The book connects Catholic history and the history of U.S. empire by demonstrating that the religious dimensions of American imperial rhetoric have been as cross-confessional as the imperial nation itself.