That there was an influx of silver dirhams from the Muslim world into eastern and northern Europe in the ninth and tenth centuries is well known, as is the fact that the largest concentration of hoards is on the Baltic island of Gotland. Recent discoveries have shown that dirhams were reaching the British Isles, too. What brought the dirhams to northern Europe in such large numbers? The fur trade has been proposed as one driver for transactions, but the slave trade offers another – complementary – explanation. This volume does not offer a comprehensive delineation of the hoard finds, or a full answer to the question of what brought the silver north. But it highlights the trade in slaves as driving exchanges on a trans-continental scale. By their very nature, the nexuses were complex, mutable and unclear even to contemporaries, and they have eluded modern scholarship. Contributions to this volume shed light on processes and key places: the mints of Central Asia; the chronology of the inflows of dirhams to Rus and northern Europe; the reasons why silver was deposited in the ground and why so much ended up on Gotland; the functioning of networks – perhaps comparable to the twenty-first-century drug trade; slave-trading in the British Isles; and the stimulus and additional networks that the Vikings brought into play. This combination of general surveys, presentations of fresh evidence and regional case studies sets Gotland and the early medieval slave trade in a firmer framework than has been available before.
Winner of the Europe Book Prize One of Europe’s most preeminent investigative journalists travels to the Czech Republic—the Czech half of the former Czechoslovakia, the land that brought us Kafka—to explore the surreal fictions and the extraordinary reality of its twentieth century. For example, there’s the story of the small businessman who adopted Henry Ford’s ideas on productivity to create the world’s largest shoe company—and hired modernist giants such as Le Corbusier to design his company towns (which were also the birthplaces of Ivana Trump and Tom Stoppard). Or the story of Kafka’s niece, who loaned her name to writers blacklisted under the Communist regime so they could keep publishing. Or the story of the singer Karel Gott, winner of the country’s Best Male Vocalist Award thirty-six years in a row, whose summer home, Gottland, is the Czech Dollywood. Based on meticulous research and hundreds of interviews with everyone from filmmakers to writers to pop stars to ordinary citizens, Gottland is a kaleidoscopic portrait of a resilient people living through difficult and often bizarre times—equally funny, disturbing, stirring and absurd . . . in a word, Kafkaesque. From the Hardcover edition.
The Swedish island of Gotland, in the Baltic, has attracted much attention of many geologists. Gotland is built up by a Middle Palaeozoic table-land, with an average height of 20-30 m, but with some higher hills in the inland and with steep cliffs along part of the coast. The Middle Palaeozoic strata consist primarily of limestones and marlstones. For a good understanding of the sedimentary succession of Gotland, it is important that the distribution of all the different kinds of sediments should be carefully mapped, and their faunal contents to be intensively studied. This book includes the survey and ideas gathered along with important data about the stratigraphy and reefs of Gotland. It presents description of the Baltic area, development of the stratigraphical subdivision of the Middle Palaeozoic of Gotland, and some tectonic and pseudo-tectonic phenomena. Stratified and unstratified sediments are presented along with a number of palaeoecological observations on Gotlandian fossils. Some comparisons of the reefs of Gotland with reefs in a few other areas are also examined.
Gotland is Sweden’s largest island and the largest island in the Baltic Sea. While Sweden has numerous Islands, Gotland’s development trajectory is unique in Sweden. It is the smallest region in the country in population size and economic base, and it is located the furthest from the mainland (90 km).
The chest was found in Mastrmyr on the the island of Gotland, Sweden in 1936. More than 200 objects were found in and around it. Most are tools that were used by blacksmiths and carpenters, many of them amazingly modern in appearance.
LIBERTY LADY is the true story of a WWII bomber and its crew forced to land in neutral Sweden during the Eighth Air Force's first large-scale daylight bombing raid on Berlin. 1st Lt. Herman Allen was interned and began working for his country's espionage agency, the OSS, with instructions to befriend a businessman suspected of selling secrets to the Germans. Soon Herman fell in love with a beautiful Swedish-American secretary working for the OSS, their courtship unfolding amid the glamour and intrigue of wartime Stockholm. As Swedish newspapers trumpeted one of the biggest spy scandals of the war, two of the main protagonists walked down the aisle in a storybook wedding presided over by the nephew of the King of Sweden.
Biogas offers a sustainable alternative to fossil fuels, promoting circularity and local economic growth. It is, therefore, increasingly prioritised by decision-makers within Sweden and the EU. Despite its advantages, the Swedish market is perceived as underachieving in terms of scale and penetration. Biogas, a socio-technical system, has necessitated state and regional support for its establishment and expansion, given its competition with entrenched fossil fuels and its inherent material limitations. This thesis primarily seeks to explore how the interplay of political, societal, and market perspectives has influenced the biogas market. The research zeroes in on the Swedish biogas market, with a special focus on the impact of geographical regions on market shaping. Using in part a longitudinal case study revealed that historically, successful regions have relied heavily on translations of missions and visions for developing the biogas markets. These translations were found to build heavily on local concerns and local resources. The consequence of this meant that the global context of the climate problem was not always the focus of policy and strategies. The significance of local interpretation was further unveiled as a component of value creation, where value is closely tied to the material and social conditions of local geographies. Value creation for intricate systems like biogas, which are multifunctional and span various social domains, indicates that biogas and biofertilisers are entities that are both naturally and socially constructed, underlining the impossibility of separating the natural from the social. The socio-material properties were important for biogas market shaping, as shown by tracing both biogas and biofertilisers. The connections between methane and fossil gas were found to be positive and negative for the biogas market. The reliance on fossil gas has created conditions that allow the biogas market to expand. However, the narrative of fossil gas as a bridge has, at times, led to doubts about biogas, and there is a risk that instead of biogas greening fossil gas, fossil gas has a ‘browning’ effect on the biogas market. For biofertiliser, the socio-material was found to be in a phase of change. It was found that the biogas market has been built for the energy market, but increasingly, it is important to consider the role of biofertiliser in this market. What was previously considered to be a by-product and a problem for the producers, is increasingly seen as an asset. Similar to the findings of the connection between fossil gas and biomethane, this is a change in social framings more than a change in the material. The movement from waste to by-product to an asset can be an important view both empirically and theoretically to foreground that for an object to be understood as valuable or sustainable, work is needed. This highlighted that markets do not simply appear, and objects are not inherently valuable or sustainable. It is instead an interplay between the social, material, and technical, which (re)shapes products and their markets. Lastly, this thesis, through the lens of marketisation, traced the concerns of the bio-gas market. It found that the biogas market is still evolving often referred to as a hot market. The boundaries of the market, including what is considered an externality, are still being defined. While this doesn’t fully account for the slow growth, it does enable stakeholders to use this understanding to influence the market’s development. As the biogas market changes, along with other factors such as the role of fossil gas, the impact of material changes with liquified biogas, and the growth of the concentrated biofertiliser market, it’s evident that the narratives will shift. This thesis adds to the empirical literature on renewable energy by emphasising that regions that depend on creating value for their citizens by promoting a local narrative will need to adapt to reflect the new material realities. This will influence both how valuation processes are conducted and the use of missions and visions by both the public and private sectors. Biogas är ett hållbart alternativ till fossila bränslen och kan dessutom främja cirkularitet och lokal ekonomisk tillväxt. Därför har biogasen alltmer prioriterats av beslutsfattare i Sverige och EU. I Sverige anses dock biogasmarknaden vara underpresterande när det gäller storlek och räckvidd. Biogas är ett sociotekniskt system som har krävt omfattande stöd från stat och lokala regioner för att etableras på grund av konkurrensen från fossila bränslen men också till följd av dess materiella restriktioner. Det primära syftet med denna avhandling är att undersöka hur samspelet mellan olika politiska, samhälleliga och marknadsmässiga inramningar har format biogasmarknaden. Studien fokuserar på biogasmarknaden i Sverige, med särskild tonvikt på olika geografiska regioners roll. En longitudinell fallstudie har gjort det möjligt att observera vilken central roll tolkningar av uppdrag och visioner har spelat för att motivera lokala aktörer att framgångsrikt utveckla biogasmarknaderna i utvalda regioner. Lokala policy-tolkningar visade sig i hög grad bygga på lokala problem och resurser som finns tillhands. Detta innebar också att klimatproblemen i en global kontext inte alltid var i fokus. Den lokala policytolkningen visade sig vidare vara en del av värdeskapandet, där värdet kopplades nära den regionala materiella och sociala kontexten. Dessa värdeskapandeprocesser visade också tydligt att biogas och biogödsel är objekt som är både naturligt och socialt konstruerade. Analysen visade den bristande förmågan att skilja på det naturliga och det sociala i komplexa system som spänner över flera sociala sfärer. De socio-materiella egenskaperna hos biometan och biogödsel är viktiga för utformningen av biogasmarknaden. Ett tydligt exempel är den nära relationen mellan biometan och fossilgas som har visat sig ha både för- och nackdelar för biogasmarknadens utveckling. En fördel är att biometan genom att använda fossilgasinfrastruktur lätt kan expandera. Narrativet om fossilgas som en brygga till fossila-fria samhället kan ses som en nackdel eftersom det har lett till tvivel om biogasens roll. Det finns en uppenbar risk för att biogasen genom fossilgaskopplingen bara anses göra fossilgas mer accepterad. Att biogödselns ställning på biogasmarknaden håller på att förändras påverkar också biogasproduktionens förutsättningar. Det som tidigare betraktades som en biprodukt till produktionen av förnybar energi och ett problem för producenterna kan numera användas som en tillgång. I likhet med effekterna av samspelet mellan fossil gas och biometan rör detta sig om en förändring av de sociala ramarna snarare än en materiell förändring. Att detta förändrade synsätt varit av central betydelse är en observation som är viktig både ur en empirisk och teoretisk synvinkel. Det visar att det går att förändra uppfattningen om ett objekt. Om objektet ska förstås som värdefullt eller hållbart krävs emellertid omfattande insatser. Det rör sig om ett samspel mellan de sociala, materiella och tekniska aspekter som (om)formar produkter och marknader. Slutligen, användningen av begreppet ”marketisation” bidrog till att synliggöra biogasmarknadens problem. Analysen visar att biogasmarknaden fortfarande utvecklas och är vad som, brukar kallas en ”het marknad. Gränserna för marknaden, inklusive vad som betraktas som externa effekter, håller fortfarande på att definieras. Även om detta inte helt förklarar den långsamma tillväxten, gör det möjligt för intressenter att använda denna kunskap för att påverka utformningen av marknaden. När biogasmarknaden förändras, tillsammans med andra faktorer såsom rollen för fossilgas, effekten av materiella förändringar med flytande biogas, och expansionen av den koncentrerade biogödselmarknaden, är det tydligt att narrativen kommer att behöva förändras. Avhandlingen bidrar till den empiriska litteraturen om förnybar energi genom att visa hur regioner genom lokalt förankrade narrativ motiverat hur biogas-satsningarna, skapat värde för medborgarna. Dessa narrativ kommer att behöva anpassas för att återspegla de nya materiella verkligheterna.
"The need to preserve farm animal diversity is increasingly urgent, says the author of this definitive book on endangered breeds of livestock and poultry. Farmyard animals may hold critical keys for our survival, Jan Dohner warns, and with each extinction, genetic traits of potentially vital importance to our agricultural future or to medical progress are forever lost."--BOOK JACKET.
