The fossil fuel revolution is usually a tale of advances in energy production. Christopher Jones tells a tale of advances in energy access—canals, pipelines, wires delivering cheap, abundant power to cities at a distance from production sites. Between 1820 and 1930 these new transportation networks set the U.S. on a path to fossil fuel dependence.
The present volume grew out of the 30th International LAUD Symposium, held on April 19–22, 2004 at the University of Koblenz-Landau in Landau, Germany. The conference, "Empowerment through Language", was centrally concerned with the concept of power and/or empowerment as observed in the status and use of language(s) and their speakers in bilingual and multilingual communities. The book discusses the theoretical issues inherent in the relation between language and power, the empowerment strategies involved in language policy and language planning situations, and the issue of language endangerment in Africa, i.e., the fate of minority languages and their speakers and the sociopolitical factors perpetuating their exclusion from access to knowledge and skills. The volume constitutes a collection of papers by prominent linguists from many countries who explore the exciting interdisciplinary area of language, power, and linguistic empowerment. Broadly speaking, the papers focus on the theoretical and sociolinguistic problems related to the role of power in language policy and language planning situations in multilingual settings, language choices, code switches, and associated topics. Thus, the aim of the volume is to open up language policy and language planning issues as observed in multilingual contexts (nations, institutions, other settings, and domains) to the wider community of critical sociolinguistics by concentrating on the relationship between language and power. More particularly, it offers a decidedly sociolinguistic perspective to the study of language and power, which likewise has been tackled from other perspectives in the areas of sociology and political science. This interdisciplinary relationship is important both for linguistics and for the sociology of language. In this way, the book is an important contribution to general linguistics, sociolinguistics, minority issues in multilingual settings as well as the social sciences. In honor of his upcoming 80th birthday (2006) , Fishman's colleagues and former students are preparing five volumes by him or about him, this being one of them.
Roads to Power tells the story of how Britain built the first nation connected by infrastructure, how a libertarian revolution destroyed a national economy, and how technology caused strangers to stop speaking. In early eighteenth-century Britain, nothing but dirt track ran between most towns. By 1848 the primitive roads were transformed into a network of highways connecting every village and island in the nation—and also dividing them in unforeseen ways. The highway network led to contests for control over everything from road management to market access. Peripheries like the Highlands demanded that centralized government pay for roads they could not afford, while English counties wanted to be spared the cost of underwriting roads to Scotland. The new network also transformed social relationships. Although travelers moved along the same routes, they occupied increasingly isolated spheres. The roads were the product of a new form of government, the infrastructure state, marked by the unprecedented control bureaucrats wielded over decisions relating to everyday life. Does information really work to unite strangers? Do markets unite nations and peoples in common interests? There are lessons here for all who would end poverty or design their markets around the principle of participation. Guldi draws direct connections between traditional infrastructure and the contemporary collapse of the American Rust Belt, the decline of American infrastructure, the digital divide, and net neutrality. In the modern world, infrastructure is our principal tool for forging new communities, but it cannot outlast the control of governance by visionaries.
Launched in 2013, China's Belt and Road Initiative is forging connections in infrastructure, trade, energy, finance, tourism, and culture across Eurasia and Africa. This extraordinarily ambitious strategy places China at the center of a geography of overland and maritime connectivity stretching across more than sixty countries and incorporating almost two-thirds of the world’s population. But what does it mean to revive the Silk Roads for the twenty-first century? Geocultural Power explores this question by considering how China is couching its strategy for building trade, foreign relations, and energy and political security in an evocative topography of history. Until now Belt and Road has been discussed as a geopolitical and geoeconomic project. This book introduces geocultural power to the analysis of international affairs. Tim Winter highlights how many countries—including Iran, Sri Lanka, Kenya, Malaysia, Indonesia, Pakistan, and others—are revisiting their histories to find points of diplomatic and cultural connection. Through the revived Silk Roads, China becomes the new author of Eurasian history and the architect of the bridge between East and West. In a diplomatic dance of forgetting, episodes of violence, invasion, and bloodshed are left behind for a language of history and heritage that crosses borders in ways that further the trade ambitions of an increasingly networked China-driven economy.
Contains all the formal opinions and accompanying orders of the Federal Power Commission ... In addition to the formal opinions, there have been included intermediate decisions which have become final and selected orders of the Commission issued during such period.
Amoral, cunning, ruthless, and instructive, this multi-million-copy New York Times bestseller is the definitive manual for anyone interested in gaining, observing, or defending against ultimate control – from the author of The Laws of Human Nature. In the book that People magazine proclaimed “beguiling” and “fascinating,” Robert Greene and Joost Elffers have distilled three thousand years of the history of power into 48 essential laws by drawing from the philosophies of Machiavelli, Sun Tzu, and Carl Von Clausewitz and also from the lives of figures ranging from Henry Kissinger to P.T. Barnum. Some laws teach the need for prudence (“Law 1: Never Outshine the Master”), others teach the value of confidence (“Law 28: Enter Action with Boldness”), and many recommend absolute self-preservation (“Law 15: Crush Your Enemy Totally”). Every law, though, has one thing in common: an interest in total domination. In a bold and arresting two-color package, The 48 Laws of Power is ideal whether your aim is conquest, self-defense, or simply to understand the rules of the game.
