A monumental study of collective violence in the premodern world, this book analyzes all instances of rebellion and banditry recorded in 1,097 countries in China during the 277 years of the Ming dynasty (1368-1644). The assembled evidence constitutes the largest annual, county-level time-series on collective violence events in any part of the world, and the 630 recorded cases are used to test the major social science theories on the origins of collective violence. Using systematic data collected from local gazetteers on natural calamities, size of harvests, famine relief, physical terrain, local construction, and troop deployment, the author advances and validates a rational-choice argument that violence increased when survival in a subsistence economy became uncertain and the likelihood of punishment was low. Analyzing the administrative effectiveness and coercive capacity of the Ming state, the author also finds evidence to support a complementary structuralist explanation for increased collective violence in times of lax rulers, state insolvency, and inadequate welfare and tax policies. After an introductory chapter, the author explicates the main theoretical and methodological issues of collective violence and sketches the empirical pattern of rebellions and banditry, differentiating them by the level of threat they posed to the regime and by the sociopolitical profile of participating groups. In the next four chapters, he relates the Ming empirical configuration to four theoretical frameworks for collective violence: rational choice,which includes the issue of motive and choice—why people chose to become bandits; opportunity, in which the level of Ming collective violence is treated to variations in a regime's coercive capacity; social change, which is used to shed light on food riots, anti-tax rebellions, and conflict between employers and employees and between natives and outsiders; and class conflict, which prompts the author to assess the Marxist explanation for collective violence by investigating revolts of commoners against imperial clansmen, bondservants against masters, and tenants against landlords. The final chapter presents how the author's conclusions on why and how people became outlaws in the Ming and points the questions for future research.

As we emerge (though perhaps only temporarily) from the pandemic, other crises move center stage: outrageous inequality, climate disaster, desperate refugees, mounting tensions of a new cold war. The abiding motif of our time is relentless chaos. Acknowledging the possibilities for new beginnings at such moments, Mao Zedong famously proclaimed "There is great disorder under heaven; the situation is excellent." The contemporary relevance of Mao's observation depends on whether today's catastrophes can be a catalyst for progress or have passed over into something terrible and irretrievable. Perhaps the disorder is no longer under, but in heaven itself. Characteristically rich in paradoxes and reversals that entertain as well as illuminate, Slavoj Žižek's new book treats with equal analytical depth the lessons of Rammstein and Corbyn, Morales and Orwell, Lenin and Christ. It excavates universal truths from local political sites across Palestine and Chile, France and Kurdistan, and beyond. Heaven In Disorder looks with fervid dispassion at the fracturing of the Left, the empty promises of liberal democracy, and the tepid compromises offered by the powerful. From the ashes of these failures, Žižek asserts the need for international solidarity, economic transformation, and--above all--an urgent, "wartime" communism.

In New Asian Disorder: Rivalries Embroiling the Pacific Century, Lowell Dittmer and his team explore the recent political disorder in East Asia resulting from growing Sino-American polarization. The rise of China in recent years is widely regarded as a momentous shift in the global balance of power. China is now extending sovereignty into the East China Sea and the South China Sea, constructing a new set of global financial institutions and replacing “universal values” with technologically enhanced nationalism. The country’s “Belt and Road Initiative” is also tainted by the vast ambition to realize the “China Dream” within the foreseeable future. In response to China’s challenge, the United States has abandoned its “constructive engagement” policy towards the rising power and engaged in a trade war. Sino-American relations have been at a historical trough since the normalization of their relationship in the late 1970s. This book sheds new light on the current political disorder in the East Asian international arena. The new Asian disorder is analyzed from three perspectives: the first focuses on identity, the second on political economy, and the third on the triangular dynamic. This collection of essays concludes that, unless and until consensus can be reached on a coherent new framework for cooperation and rule enforcement among different stakeholders in East Asia, the current disorder may be expected to persist. “Focusing on the impact of Xi Jinping and Donald Trump, this book sees rivalries undermining the post–Cold War order but not leading to a full breakdown. Stress is on identities, strategies, and triangles related to the Sino-US rivalry. Dittmer argues that these factors will drive further changes. Readers will find a diversity of approaches on a most critical bilateral relationship.” —Gilbert Rozman, Princeton University; editor of The Asan Forum “A great read to better comprehend the ‘New Asian Disorder’ that the growing China-US rivalry has been contributing to, as well as its implications for the other actors of the region, be they big as Japan or smaller as Australia, Southeast Asian nations or Taiwan.” —Jean-Pierre Cabestan, Hong Kong Baptist University; senior research fellow of the French Research Institute on East Asia, Inalco, Paris

Explains why Mao launched the Cultural Revolution, and shows his Machiavellian role in masterminding it. This book documents the Hobbesian state that ensued. Power struggles raged among Lin Biao, Zhou Enlai, Deng Xiaoping, and Jiang Qing - Mao's wife and leader of the Gang of Four - while Mao often played one against the other.

Economics.

“The work of a young writer with tremendous ambition, a bildungsroman of religion and revolution set during an obscure chapter of American history.” —The Washington Post A powerful and impressive debut novel from the winner of the Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival Prize for fiction—first in the Woolsack family saga that continues with Secessia and The New Inheritors. The Blood of Heaven is the story of Angel Woolsack, a preacher’s son, who flees the hardscrabble life of his itinerant father, falls in with a charismatic highwayman, then settles with his adopted brothers on the rough frontier of West Florida, where American settlers are carving their place out of lands held by the Spaniards and the French. The novel moves from the bordellos of Natchez, where Angel meets his love Red Kate to the Mississippi River plantations, where the brutal system of slave labor is creating fantastic wealth along with terrible suffering, and finally to the back rooms of New Orleans among schemers, dreamers, and would-be revolutionaries plotting to break away from the young United States and create a new country under the leadership of the renegade founding father Aaron Burr. The Blood of Heaven is a remarkable portrait of a young man seizing his place in a violent new world, a moving love story, and a vivid tale of ambition and political machinations that brilliantly captures the energy and wildness of a young America where anything was possible. It is a startling debut. “Wascom is a craftsman, and each of his lengthy, winding sentences shimmers with the tang of blood and bone and sweat, and the archaic splendor of his language.” —The Boston Globe