Built in the 1890s at the center of the nation, Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary was designed specifically to be a replica of the US Capitol Building. But why? The Prison of Democracy explains the political significance of a prison built to mimic one of America’s monuments to democracy. Locating Leavenworth in memory, history, and law, the prison geographically sits at the borders of Indian Territory (1825–1854) and Bleeding Kansas (1854–1864), both sites of contestation over slavery and freedom. Author Sara M. Benson argues that Leavenworth reshaped the design of punishment in America by gradually normalizing state-inflicted violence against citizens. Leavenworth’s peculiar architecture illustrates the real roots of mass incarceration—as an explicitly race- and nation-building system that has been ingrained in the very fabric of US history rather than as part of a recent post-war racial history. The book sheds light on the truth of the painful relationship between the carceral state and democracy in the United States—a relationship that thrives to this day.

“The imaginative rereading, through primary sources, of Fort Leavenworth and a host of other subjects including abolitionism, border prisons, North-South relations, and the campaign against Native Americans adds up to an original and exceptionally significant piece of research and scholarship.” DESMOND KING, author of Separate and Unequal

“A significant contribution to the literature regarding race, crime, and punishment. The analytical insight that the author provides through a rereading and recentering of Leavenworth is both a contribution to and an immanent critique of racialized notions of mass incarceration.” DANIEL KATO, author of Liberalizing Lynching

SARA M. BENSON is a Lecturer in the Department of Political Science at San Jose State University and teaches at Oakes College at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Persian is one of the great lingua francas of world history. Yet despite its recognition as a shared language across the Islamic world and beyond, its scope, impact, and mechanisms remain underexplored. A world historical inquiry into pre-modern cosmopolitanism, The Persianate World traces the reach and limits of Persian as a Eurasian language in a comprehensive survey of its geographical, literary, and social frontiers. From Siberia to Southeast Asia, and between London and Beijing, this book shows how Persian gained, maintained, and finally surrendered its status to imperial and vernacular competitors. Fourteen essays trace Persian’s interactions with Bengali, Chinese, Turkic, Punjabi, and other languages to identify the forces that extended “Persographia,” the domain of written Persian. Spanning the ages of expansion and contraction, The Persianate World offers a critical survey of both the supports and constraints of one of history’s key languages of global exchange.

“This groundbreaking collection illuminates the multifaceted and very complex history of the rise and decline of the Persian language as a lingua franca.” AHMAD KARIMI-HAKKAK, author of Recasting Persian Poetry

“With erudition and refinement, this book accomplishes something remarkable—it provides a timely corrective to an anachronistic understanding of the Persianate sphere as an empire of letters centred on Iran.” PAOLO SARTORI, author of Visions of Justice

“An exceptionally important contribution to our understanding of what constituted the Persianate world.” ANDREW PEACOCK, University of St. Andrews

NILE GREEN holds the Ibn Khaldun Endowed Chair in World History at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of Sufism: A Global History and Terrains of Exchange: Religious Economies of Global Islam and editor of Afghanistan’s Islam: From Conversion to the Taliban.

Scholarly discussions on economic development in history, specifically those linked to industrialization or modern economic growth, have paid great attention to the formation and development of the market economy as a set of institutions able to augment people’s welfare. The role of nonmarket practices for promoting economic development and success has been an area of interest, typically involving discussion of the state’s economic policies. How have societies tackled problems that the market did not handle well? To what extent did their solutions reflect the structure of their economy?

Public Goods Provision in the Early Modern Economy explores these questions by investigating efforts made for the provision of “public goods” in early modern economies from the perspective of Japanese socioeconomic history during the Tokugawa era (1603–1868), and comparing those cases with others from Europe and China. The contributors focus on three areas of inquiry—welfare policies for the poor, infrastructure, and forest management—to provide both a unique perspective on Japanese public finance at local levels and a vantage point outside of Europe. The book seeks to encourage a more global view of the early modern political economies that shaped subsequent modern transformations.

“With new global evidence that goes well beyond the timeworn topics of taxation and military spending, Public Goods Provision will make historians and social scientists rethink the development of fiscal systems, the history of public spending, and the long-run pattern of political and economic development.” PHILIP T. HOFFMAN, author of Why Did Europe Conquer the World?

MASAYUKI TANIMOTO is Professor of Economic History at the University of Tokyo and editor of The Role of Tradition in Japan’s Industrialization: Another Path to Industrialization. R. BIN WONG is Distinguished Professor of History at the University of California, Los Angeles, and coauthor of Before and Beyond Divergence: The Politics of Economic Change in China and Europe.

In the post–World War I American climate of isolationism, nativism, democratic expansion of civic rights, and consumerism, Italian-born star Rodolfo Valentino and Italy’s dictator Benito Mussolini became surprising paragons of authoritarian male power and mass appeal. Drawing on extensive archival research in the United States and Italy, Giorgio Bertellini’s work shows how their popularity, both political and erotic, largely depended on the efforts of public opinion managers, including publicists, journalists, and even ambassadors. Beyond the democratic celebrations of the Jazz Age, the promotion of their charismatic masculinity through spectacle and press coverage inaugurated the now-familiar convergence of popular celebrity and political authority.

“A fantastic and an eminently readable milestone in the study of celebrity. Bertellini sets a new standard for archival and analytical approaches to movie stardom in the 1920s while also illuminating the political stakes of celebrity that resonate with twenty-first-century culture.” GAYLYN STUDLAR, author of Precocious Charms: Stars Performing Girlhood in Classical Hollywood

“This is a remarkable and timely study, and a model of interdisciplinary and transnational scholarship. Only someone with Bertellini’s cross-disciplinary expertise and meticulous research skills could pull together these cases and weave them into a compelling account of the ‘cinema effect’ on American politics.” BARBARA SPACKMAN, University of California, Berkeley

“Bertellini’s brilliant book shows clearly how celebrity and promotional culture became integral to new practices of mass governance in the early twentieth century. It is a crucial history, essential also to any genealogy of the mediatized present and the rise of modes of authoritarian and neofascist governance.” LEE GRIEVESON, author of Cinema and the Wealth of Nations: Media, Capital, and the Liberal World System

GIORGIO BERTELLINI is Professor of Film and Media History at the University of Michigan. He is the author and editor of the award-winning volumes Italy in Early American Cinema: Race, Landscape, and the Picturesque and Italian Silent Cinema: A Reader.

Revolutionary Bodies is the first English-language primary source–based history of concert dance in the People’s Republic of China. Combining over a decade of ethnographic and archival research, Emily Wilcox analyzes major dance works by Chinese choreographers staged over an eighty-year period from 1935 to 2015. Using previously unexamined film footage, photographic documentation, performance programs, and other historical and contemporary sources, Wilcox challenges the commonly accepted view that Soviet-inspired revolutionary ballets are the primary legacy of the socialist era in China’s dance field. The digital edition of this title includes nineteen embedded videos of selected dance works discussed by the author.

“This excellent book is based on abundant archival materials and Emily Wilcox’s practiced knowledge of dance. Its dramatic biographical data, clear conceptual design, and close readings of choreographic works make for engaging reading and engaged scholarship. An important contribution.” REBECCA KARL, Professor of History, New York University

“Tracing the rise of Chinese dance in the turbulent times of twentieth-century China, Wilcox has offered a brilliant account of the mutation of diverse dance forms. A productive blend of choreography, ethnography, performance, and cultural studies, this book not only fills the gaps in dance studies, but also addresses broad issues of interaction between China and the West, ancient forms and socialist agenda, and regional traditions and national culture.” BAN WANG, William Haas Professor in Chinese Studies, Stanford University

EMILY WILCOX is Assistant Professor of Modern Chinese Studies in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Rules of the House offers a dynamic revisionist account of the Japanese colonial rule of Korea (1910–1945) by examining the roles of women in the civil courts. Challenging the dominant view that women were victimized by the Japanese family laws and its patriarchal biases, Sungyun Lim argues that Korean women had to struggle equally against Korean patriarchal interests. Moreover, women were not passive victims; instead, they proactively struggled to expand their rights by participating in the Japanese colonial legal system. In turn, the Japanese doctrine of promoting progressive legal rights would prove advantageous to them. Following female plaintiffs and their civil disputes from the precolonial Chosŏn dynasty through the colonial period and into the postcolonial era, this book presents a new and groundbreaking story about Korean women’s legal struggles, revealing their surprising collaborative relationship with the colonial state.

“A timely and fascinating study, demonstrating the complex interplay between gender politics and empire building through the examination of the legal construction of the ideal modern family that was deeply implicated with the invention or appropriation of tradition. A major contribution to gender history, empire studies, and legal studies.” HYAEWEOL CHOI, author of Gender and Mission Encounters in Korea: New Women, Old Ways

“Challenges the conventional nationalist narrative of colonial Korea and restores agency to female plaintiffs and defendants. It should be read not only by those interested in colonial Korea and the Japanese empire, but also by historians of comparative and colonial law, the family, and gender.” SUSAN L. BURNS, Professor of History, University of Chicago

SUNGYUN LIM is Assistant Professor of Modern Korean and Japanese History at the University of Colorado Boulder.

In Mountain, Water, Rock, God, Luke Whitmore situates the disastrous flooding that fell on the Hindu Himalayan shrine of Kedarnath in 2013 within a broader religious and ecological context. Whitmore explores the longer story of this powerful realm of the Hindu god Shiva through a holistic theoretical perspective that integrates phenomenological and systems-based approaches to the study of religion, pilgrimage, place, and ecology. He argues that close attention to places of religious significance offers a model for thinking through connections between ritual, narrative, climate destabilization, tourism, development, and disaster, and he shows how these critical components of human life in the twenty-first century intersect in the human experience of place.

“Mountain, Water, Rock, God is the first book-length scholarly treatment of Kedarnath, a pilgrimage destination of pan-Indian importance. Accessible and poetically evocative, the work is timely, at times wrenching, and the scholarship is superior, covering important ground across disciplines. No one is better situated to write this study than Luke Whitmore.” CORINNE DEMPSEY, Professor of Religious Studies and Director of Global Studies, Nazareth College

LUKE WHITMORE is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Stevens Point.

When China’s War of Resistance against Japan began in July 1937, it sparked an immediate health crisis throughout China. In the end, China not only survived the war but emerged from the trauma with a more cohesive population. Intimate Communities argues that women who worked as military and civilian nurses, doctors, and midwives during this turbulent period built the national community, one relationship at a time. In a country with a majority illiterate, agricultural population that could not relate to urban elites’ conceptualization of nationalism, these women used their work of healing to create emotional bonds with soldiers and civilians from across the country. These bonds transcended the divides of social class, region, gender, and language.

“Nicole Elizabeth Barnes demonstrates remarkable insights into some of the most well-known figures in healthcare in wartime China—and introduces many previously unknown—providing pointed character analyses while also connecting individual experiences to larger sociopolitical trends across the tumultuous wartime landscape.” SONYA GRYPMA, PhD, RN, author of China Interrupted: Japanese Internment and the Reshaping of a Canadian Missionary Community

“Not only a major contribution to the histories of medicine, gender, emotion, and nationalism, but even more importantly, it opens up exciting horizons by making visible and exploring the surprising entanglements between them all.” SEAN HSIANG-LIN LEI, author of Neither Donkey nor Horse: Medicine in the Struggle over China’s Modernity

NICOLE ELIZABETH BARNES is Andrew W. Mellon Assistant Professor of History and Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies at Duke University.

In The Monastery Rules Berthe Jansen discusses the position of the monasteries in pre-modern Tibetan Buddhist societies and how that position was informed by the far-reaching relationship of monastic Buddhism with Tibetan society, economy, law, and culture. Jansen focuses her study on monastic guidelines or bca’ yig. The first study of its kind to examine the genre of bca’ yig in detail, the book contains an exploration of parallels of these texts in other Buddhist cultures, their connection to the Vinaya, and their value as sociohistorical source material. The monastic guidelines are witness to certain socioeconomic changes, but they also indicate that the monastery created rules intended to change the monastery in order to preserve it. Jansen argues that the monastic institutions’ influence on society was maintained not merely due to prevailing power-relations, but also because of certain deep-rooted Buddhist beliefs.

“The Monastery Rules provides an invaluable resource for those interested in a richer picture of traditional Tibet and its monastic life. This book will be an important scholarly resource.” GEORGES DREYFUS, Jackson Professor of Religion, Williams College, and author of The Sound of Two Hands Clapping

“This book provides a welcome and much needed contribution to our understanding of Tibetan monasticism. While monastic institutions have long been recognized as hubs of Buddhist life in Tibet, this study provides an extensive and granular exploration of pre-modern Tibetan monasteries as sites of community organization and integration, and as mediators of religious power.” ANDREW QUINTMAN, author of The Yogin and the Madman

BERTHE JANSEN is Professor of Central Asian Studies at the Institute for Indian and Central Asian Studies, Leipzig University.

David Atwill transports readers to the heart of the Himalayas as he traces the rise of the Tibetan Muslim community from the seventeenth century to the mid-twentieth century. Radically altering popular interpretations that have portrayed Tibet as isolated and monolithically Buddhist, Atwill’s vibrant account demonstrates how truly cosmopolitan Tibetan society was by highlighting the hybrid infl uences and internal diversity of Tibet. In its exploration of the Tibetan Muslim experience, Islamic Shangri-La presents an unparalleled perspective of Tibet’s standing during the rise of post–World War II Asia.

“Atwill’s groundbreaking book traces a forgotten Muslim thread through the knot of identity, subjecthood, and citizenship in twentieth-century Tibet, offering a fresh perspective on the region’s tumultuous modern history. It is a highly readable narrative of a Muslim community that has often been rendered invisible, and an important statement on the transition from empires to nation-states at the Inner Asian nexus of Tibet, China, India, and the Islamic world.” RIAN THUM, author of The Sacred Routes of Uyghur History

“The history of the Tibetan Muslims, which at fi rst may seem like yet another borderland oddity, actually provides a remarkable vantage point from which to survey Asian history anew. Not only does Atwill’s use of untapped archival sources and interviews produce original scholarship, but his innovative framing of the material provides valuable perspectives on a history we thought we knew quite well.” JOHAN ELVERSKOG, author of Buddhism and Islam on the Silk Road

DAVID G. ATWILL is Associate Professor of History at Penn State University where he teaches a broad range of courses on China, Tibet, and world history. His previous books include The Chinese Sultanate: Islam, Ethnicity, and the Panthay Rebellion in Southwestern China, 1856–1873 and Sources in Chinese History: Diverse Perspectivesfrom 1644 to the Present.