Making the Modern World

Making the Modern World PDF

Author: Vaclav Smil

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2013-12-16

Total Pages: 263

ISBN-13: 1119942535

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How much further should the affluent world push its material consumption? Does relative dematerialization lead to absolute decline in demand for materials? These and many other questions are discussed and answered in Making the Modern World: Materials and Dematerialization. Over the course of time, the modern world has become dependent on unprecedented flows of materials. Now even the most efficient production processes and the highest practical rates of recycling may not be enough to result in dematerialization rates that would be high enough to negate the rising demand for materials generated by continuing population growth and rising standards of living. This book explores the costs of this dependence and the potential for substantial dematerialization of modern economies. Making the Modern World: Materials and Dematerialization considers the principal materials used throughout history, from wood and stone, through to metals, alloys, plastics and silicon, describing their extraction and production as well as their dominant applications. The evolving productivities of material extraction, processing, synthesis, finishing and distribution, and the energy costs and environmental impact of rising material consumption are examined in detail. The book concludes with an outlook for the future, discussing the prospects for dematerialization and potential constrains on materials. This interdisciplinary text provides useful perspectives for readers with backgrounds including resource economics, environmental studies, energy analysis, mineral geology, industrial organization, manufacturing and material science.

Making the Modern Middle East

Making the Modern Middle East PDF

Author: T. G. Fraser

Publisher: Gingko Library

Published: 2014-07-15

Total Pages: 412

ISBN-13: 1909942014

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A century ago, as World War I got underway, the Middle East was dominated, as it had been for centuries, by the Ottoman Empire. But by 1923, its political shape had changed beyond recognition, as the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the insistent claims of Arab and Turkish nationalism and Zionism led to a redrawing of borders and shuffling of alliances—a transformation whose consequences are still felt today. This fully revised and updated second edition of The Makers of the Modern Middle East traces those changes and the ensuing history of the region through the rest of the twentieth century and on to the present. Focusing in particular on three leaders—Emir Feisal, Mustafa Kemal, and Chaim Weizmann—the book offers a clear, authoritative account of the region seen from a transnational perspective, one that enables readers to understand its complex history and the way it affects present-day events.

Makers of Modern India

Makers of Modern India PDF

Author: Ramachandra Guha

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2013-10-14

Total Pages: 513

ISBN-13: 0674725964

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Modern India is the world's largest democracy, a sprawling, polyglot nation containing one-sixth of all humankind. The existence of such a complex and distinctive democratic regime qualifies as one of the world's bona fide political miracles. Furthermore, India's leading political thinkers have often served as its most influential political actorsÑthink of Gandhi, whose collected works run to more than ninety volumes, or Ambedkar, or Nehru, who recorded their most eloquent theoretical reflections at the same time as they strove to set the delicate machinery of Indian democracy on a coherent and just path. Out of the speeches and writings of these thinker-activists, Ramachandra Guha has built the first major anthology of Indian social and political thought. Makers of Modern India collects the work of nineteen of India's foremost generators of political sentiment, from those whose names command instant global recognition to pioneering subaltern and feminist thinkers whose works have until now remained obscure and inaccessible. Ranging across manifold languages and cultures, and addressing every crucial theme of modern Indian historyÑrace, religion, language, caste, gender, colonialism, nationalism, economic development, violence, and nonviolenceÑMakers of Modern India provides an invaluable roadmap to Indian political debate. An extensive introduction, biographical sketches of each figure, and guides to further reading make this work a rich resource for anyone interested in India and the ways its leading political minds have grappled with the problems that have increasingly come to define the modern world.

Makers of Modern Asia

Makers of Modern Asia PDF

Author: Ramachandra Guha

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2014-08-29

Total Pages: 394

ISBN-13: 0674365410

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The twenty-first century has been dubbed the Asian Century. Highlighting diverse thinker-politicians rather than billionaire businessmen, Makers of Modern Asia presents eleven leaders who theorized and organized anticolonial movements, strategized and directed military campaigns, and designed and implemented political systems.

The Worldmakers

The Worldmakers PDF

Author: Ayesha Ramachandran

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2015-10-13

Total Pages: 299

ISBN-13: 022628879X

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Ayesha Ramachandran reconstructs the imaginative struggles of early modern artists, philosophers, and writers to make sense of something that we take for granted: the world, imagined as a whole. 'The Worldmakers' moves beyond histories of globalisation to explore how 'the world' itself - variously understood as an object of inquiry, a comprehensive category, and a system of order - was self-consciously shaped by human agents.

Georges Clemenceau

Georges Clemenceau PDF

Author: David Watson

Publisher: Haus Publishing

Published: 2009-03-01

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 1907822089

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The Anglo-Saxon view of Georges Clemenceau (1841-1929) is based on John Maynard Keynes's misjudged caricature, that he had imposed a treaty that was harsh and oppressive of Germany. French critics' view, however, is that he had been too lenient, and left Germany in a position to challenge the treaty. In fact the treaty was a just settlement, and it could have been maintained. The failure was not in the terms of the treaty but in the subsequent failure to insist on maintaining them in the face of German resistance.

Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World

Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World PDF

Author: Jack Weatherford

Publisher: Crown

Published: 2005-03-22

Total Pages: 354

ISBN-13: 0609809644

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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The startling true history of how one extraordinary man from a remote corner of the world created an empire that led the world into the modern age—by the author featured in Echoes of the Empire: Beyond Genghis Khan. The Mongol army led by Genghis Khan subjugated more lands and people in twenty-five years than the Romans did in four hundred. In nearly every country the Mongols conquered, they brought an unprecedented rise in cultural communication, expanded trade, and a blossoming of civilization. Vastly more progressive than his European or Asian counterparts, Genghis Khan abolished torture, granted universal religious freedom, and smashed feudal systems of aristocratic privilege. From the story of his rise through the tribal culture to the explosion of civilization that the Mongol Empire unleashed, this brilliant work of revisionist history is nothing less than the epic story of how the modern world was made.