Michael E. Smith - Böcker

Part of a resurgence in the comparative study of ancient societies, this book presents a variety of methods and approaches to comparative analysis through the examination of wide-ranging case studies. Each chapter is a comparative study, and the diverse topics and regions covered in the book contribute to the growing understanding of variation and change in ancient complex societies. The authors explore themes ranging from urbanization and settlement patterns, to the political strategies of kings and chiefs, to the economic choices of individuals and households. The case studies cover an array of geographical settings, from the Andes to Southeast Asia. The authors are leading archaeologists whose research on early empires, states, and chiefdoms is at the cutting edge of scientific archaeology.

Part of a resurgence in the comparative study of ancient societies, this book presents a variety of methods and approaches to comparative analysis through the examination of wide-ranging case studies. Each chapter is a comparative study, and the diverse topics and regions covered in the book contribute to the growing understanding of variation and change in ancient complex societies. The authors explore themes ranging from urbanization and settlement patterns, to the political strategies of kings and chiefs, to the economic choices of individuals and households. The case studies cover an array of geographical settings, from the Andes to Southeast Asia. The authors are leading archaeologists whose research on early empires, states, and chiefdoms is at the cutting edge of scientific archaeology.

In Everyday Life in the Aztec World, Frances Berdan and Michael E. Smith offer a view into the lives of real people, doing very human things, in the unique cultural world of Aztec central Mexico. The first section focuses on people from an array of social classes - the emperor, a priest, a feather worker, a merchant, a farmer, and a slave - who interacted in the economic, social and religious realms of the Aztec world. In the second section, the authors examine four important life events where the lives of these and others intersected: the birth and naming of a child, market day, a day at court, and a battle. Through the microscopic views of individual types of lives, and interweaving of those lives into the broader Aztec world, Berdan and Smith recreate everyday life in the final years of the Aztec Empire.

The emergence of a common security and foreign policy has been one of the most contentious issues accompanying the integration of the European Union. In this book, Michael Smith examines the specific ways foreign policy cooperation has been institutionalized in the EU, the way institutional development affects cooperative outcomes in foreign policy, and how those outcomes lead to new institutional reforms. Smith explains the evolution and performance of the institutional procedures of the EU using a unique analytical framework, supported by extensive empirical evidence drawn from interviews, case studies, official documents and secondary sources. His perceptive and well-informed analysis covers the entire history of EU foreign policy cooperation, from its origins in the late 1960s up to the start of the 2003 constitutional convention. Demonstrating the importance and extent of EU foreign/security policy, the book will be of interest to scholars, researchers and policy-makers.

In Everyday Life in the Aztec World, Frances Berdan and Michael E. Smith offer a view into the lives of real people, doing very human things, in the unique cultural world of Aztec central Mexico. The first section focuses on people from an array of social classes - the emperor, a priest, a feather worker, a merchant, a farmer, and a slave - who interacted in the economic, social and religious realms of the Aztec world. In the second section, the authors examine four important life events where the lives of these and others intersected: the birth and naming of a child, market day, a day at court, and a battle. Through the microscopic views of individual types of lives, and interweaving of those lives into the broader Aztec world, Berdan and Smith recreate everyday life in the final years of the Aztec Empire.

The emergence of a common security and foreign policy has been one of the most contentious issues accompanying the integration of the European Union. In this book, Michael Smith examines the specific ways foreign policy cooperation has been institutionalized in the EU, the way institutional development affects cooperative outcomes in foreign policy, and how those outcomes lead to new institutional reforms. Smith explains the evolution and performance of the institutional procedures of the EU using a unique analytical framework, supported by extensive empirical evidence drawn from interviews, case studies, official documents and secondary sources. His perceptive and well-informed analysis covers the entire history of EU foreign policy cooperation, from its origins in the late 1960s up to the start of the 2003 constitutional convention. Demonstrating the importance and extent of EU foreign/security policy, the book will be of interest to scholars, researchers and policy-makers.

The Ancient Civilizations of Mesoamerica: A Reader brings together twenty-three of the most influential essays by leading scholars to reveal the rich variety of cultures and societies that existed in ancient Mesoamerica.

The Ancient Civilizations of Mesoamerica: A Reader brings together twenty-three of the most influential essays by leading scholars to reveal the rich variety of cultures and societies that existed in ancient Mesoamerica.

This volume, newly available in paperback, examines the role of the European Union in creating a system of governance involving the countries and regions of its new ‘neighbourhood’. Enlargement has functioned as one of the EU’s most effective foreign policy tools, yet the EU is rapidly approaching the limits of its capacity to accept new member states. It therefore must develop ways of extending and preserving the European zone of peace and stability that do not rely on the prospect of membership as a means of influencing the behaviour of non-member countries.A major step in this direction is the EU’s new European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP). The ENP aims to create a ring of ‘well-governed and friendly’ countries along the EU’s eastern, southeastern, and southern peripheries. This volume situates this policy in a broad, analytically-coherent framework, supported by a full range of ENP case studies, to explain whether the ENP represents a truly new approach to regional governance.

With its rich archaeological and historical record, the Aztec empire provides an intriguing opportunity to understand the dynamics and structure of early states and empires. Rethinking the Aztec Economy brings together leading scholars from multiple disciplines to thoroughly synthesize and examine the nature of goods and their movements across rural and urban landscapes in Mesoamerica. In so doing, they provide a new way of understanding society and economy in the Aztec empire.The volume is divided into three parts. Part 1 synthesizes our current understanding of the Aztec economy and singles out the topics of urbanism and provincial merchant activity for more detailed analysis. Part 2 brings new data and a new conceptual approach that applies insights from behavioral economics to Nahua and Aztec rituals and social objects. Contributors also discuss how high-value luxury goods, such as feather art, provide insights about both economic and sacred concepts of value in Aztec society. Part 3 reexamines the economy at the Aztec periphery. The volume concludes with a synthesis on the scale, integration, and nature of change in the Aztec imperial economy.Rethinking the Aztec Economy illustrates how superficially different kinds of social contexts were in fact integrated into a single society through the processes of a single economy. Using the world of goods as a crucial entry point, this volume advances scholarly understanding of life in the Aztec world.

Is wealth inequality a universal feature of human societies, or did early peoples live an egalitarian existence? How did inequality develop before the modern era? Did inequalities in wealth increase as people settled into a way of life dominated by farming and herding? Why in general do such disparities increase, and how recent are the high levels of wealth inequality now experienced in many developed nations? How can archaeologists tell?Ten Thousand Years of Inequality addresses these and other questions by presenting the first set of consistent quantitative measurements of ancient wealth inequality. The authors are archaeologists who have adapted the Gini index, a statistical measure of wealth distribution often used by economists to measure contemporary inequality, and applied it to house-size distributions over time and around the world. Clear descriptions of methods and assumptions serve as a model for other archaeologists and historians who want to document past patterns of wealth disparity.The chapters cover a variety of ancient cases, including early hunter-­gatherers, farmer villages, and agrarian states and empires. The final chapter synthesizes and compares the results. Among the new and notable outcomes, the authors report a systematic difference between higher levels of inequality in ancient Old World societies and lower levels in their New World counterparts.For the first time, archaeology allows humanity's deep past to provide an account of the early manifestations of wealth inequality around the world.Contributors: Nicholas Ames, Alleen Betzenhauser, Amy Bogaard, Samuel Bowles, Meredith S. Chesson, Abhijit Dandekar, Timothy J. Dennehy, Robert D. Drennan, Laura J. Ellyson, Deniz Enverova, Ronald K. Faulseit, Gary M. Feinman, Mattia Fochesato, Thomas A. Foor, Vishwas D. Gogte, Timothy A. Kohler, Ian Kuijt, Chapurukha M. Kusimba, Mary-Margaret Murphy, Linda M. Nicholas, Rahul C. Oka, Matthew Pailes, Christian E. Peterson, Anna Marie Prentiss, Michael E. Smith, Elizabeth C. Stone, Amy Styring, Jade Whitlam.

Recent realizations that prehispanic cities in Mesoamerica were fundamentally different from western cities of the same period have led to increasing examination of the neighborhood as an intermediate unit at the heart of prehispanic urbanization. This book addresses the subject of neighborhoods in archaeology as analytical units between households and whole settlements. The contributions gathered here provide fieldwork data to document the existence of sociopolitically distinct neighborhoods within ancient Mesoamerican settlements, building upon recent advances in multi-scale archaeological studies of these communities. Chapters illustrate the cultural variation across Mesoamerica, including data and interpretations on several different cities with a thematic focus on regional contrasts. This topic is relatively new and complex, and this book is a strong contribution for three interwoven reasons. First, the long history of research on the “Teotihuacan barrios” is scrutinized and withstands the test of new evidence and comparison with other Mesoamerican cities. Second, Maya studies of dense settlement patterns are now mature enough to provide substantial case studies. Third, theoretical investigation of ancient urbanization all over the world is now more complex and open than it was before, giving relevance to Mesoamerican perspectives on ancient and modern societies in time and space. This volume will be of interest not only to scholars and student specialists of the Mesoamerican past but also to social scientists and urbanists looking to contrast ancient cultures worldwide.

In this book, Michael Smith offers a comparative and interdisciplinary examination of ancient settlements and cities. Early cities varied considerably in their political and economic organization and dynamics. Smith here introduces a coherent approach to urbanism that is transdisciplinary in scope, scientific in epistemology, and anchored in the urban literature of the social sciences. His new insight is 'energized crowding,' a concept that captures the consequences of social interactions within the built environment resulting from increases in population size and density within settlements. Smith explores the implications of features such as empires, states, markets, households, and neighborhoods for urban life and society through case studies from around the world. Direct influences on urban life - as mediated by energized crowding-are organized into institutional (top-down forces) and generative (bottom-up processes). Smith's volume analyzes their similarities and differences with contemporary cities, and highlights the relevance of ancient cities for understanding urbanism and its challenges today.

In this book, Michael Smith offers a comparative and interdisciplinary examination of ancient settlements and cities. Early cities varied considerably in their political and economic organization and dynamics. Smith here introduces a coherent approach to urbanism that is transdisciplinary in scope, scientific in epistemology, and anchored in the urban literature of the social sciences. His new insight is 'energized crowding,' a concept that captures the consequences of social interactions within the built environment resulting from increases in population size and density within settlements. Smith explores the implications of features such as empires, states, markets, households, and neighborhoods for urban life and society through case studies from around the world. Direct influences on urban life - as mediated by energized crowding-are organized into institutional (top-down forces) and generative (bottom-up processes). Smith's volume analyzes their similarities and differences with contemporary cities, and highlights the relevance of ancient cities for understanding urbanism and its challenges today.

The EU's emergence as an international security provider, under the first Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) operations in the Balkans in 2003, is a critical development in European integration. In this book, which relies on extensive interviews with CSDP officials, Michael E. Smith investigates how the challenge of launching new CSDP operations causes the EU to adapt itself in order to improve its performance in this realm, through the mechanism of experiential institutional learning. However, although this learning has helped to expand the overall range and complexity of the CSDP, the effectiveness of this policy tool still varies widely depending on the nature of individual operations. The analysis also calls in to question whether the CSDP, and the EU's broader structures under the 2009 Treaty of Lisbon, are fit for purpose in light of the EU's growing strategic ambitions and the various security challenges facing Europe in recent years.

This innovative new text focuses on the politics of international security: how and why issues are interpreted as threats to international security and how such threats are managed. After a brief introduction to the field and its major theories and approaches, the core chapters systematically analyze the major issues on the contemporary international security agenda. Each is examined according to a common framework that brings out the nature of the threat and the responses open to policy makers.From war, terrorism and weapons of mass destruction, through environmental and economic crises, to epidemics, cyber-war and piracy, the twenty-first century world seems beset by a daunting range of international security problems. At the same time, the academic study of security has become more fragmented and contested than ever before as new actors, issues and theories increasingly challenge traditional concepts and approaches.This new edition has been heavily revised to discuss for the failings of the Obama admiration and its strategic partners on a number of different security issues, and the constant, evolving instances of turmoil the world has experienced since, whilst providing the skills students need to conduct their own research of international security issues occurring outside of this text, and for issues yet to occur. Cyber security, the 'Arab Spring' revolutions, the Ebola outbreak, and the refugee crisis are just some examples of the plethora of subjects that Smith analyses within this text.This textbook is an essential for those studying international security, whether at undergraduate or postgraduate level as part of a degree in international relations, politics, and other social sciences more generally.New to this Edition:- Chapter on cyber security- Up-to-date issues and field coverage - New 'mini-case studies' in each chapter- Updated analytical/pedagogical framework Pioneering framework for students to apply theory and empirical evidence correctly to tackle analytical and comparative tasks concerning both traditional and non-traditional security issues

This innovative new text focuses on the politics of international security: how and why issues are interpreted as threats to international security and how such threats are managed. After a brief introduction to the field and its major theories and approaches, the core chapters systematically analyze the major issues on the contemporary international security agenda. Each is examined according to a common framework that brings out the nature of the threat and the responses open to policy makers.From war, terrorism and weapons of mass destruction, through environmental and economic crises, to epidemics, cyber-war and piracy, the twenty-first century world seems beset by a daunting range of international security problems. At the same time, the academic study of security has become more fragmented and contested than ever before as new actors, issues and theories increasingly challenge traditional concepts and approaches.This new edition has been heavily revised to discuss for the failings of the Obama admiration and its strategic partners on a number of different security issues, and the constant, evolving instances of turmoil the world has experienced since, whilst providing the skills students need to conduct their own research of international security issues occurring outside of this text, and for issues yet to occur. Cyber security, the 'Arab Spring' revolutions, the Ebola outbreak, and the refugee crisis are just some examples of the plethora of subjects that Smith analyses within this text.This textbook is an essential for those studying international security, whether at undergraduate or postgraduate level as part of a degree in international relations, politics, and other social sciences more generally.New to this Edition:- Chapter on cyber security- Up-to-date issues and field coverage - New 'mini-case studies' in each chapter- Updated analytical/pedagogical framework Pioneering framework for students to apply theory and empirical evidence correctly to tackle analytical and comparative tasks concerning both traditional and non-traditional security issues

The EU's emergence as an international security provider, under the first Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) operations in the Balkans in 2003, is a critical development in European integration. In this book, which relies on extensive interviews with CSDP officials, Michael E. Smith investigates how the challenge of launching new CSDP operations causes the EU to adapt itself in order to improve its performance in this realm, through the mechanism of experiential institutional learning. However, although this learning has helped to expand the overall range and complexity of the CSDP, the effectiveness of this policy tool still varies widely depending on the nature of individual operations. The analysis also calls in to question whether the CSDP, and the EU's broader structures under the 2009 Treaty of Lisbon, are fit for purpose in light of the EU's growing strategic ambitions and the various security challenges facing Europe in recent years.

While many consumers profess a desire to help end climate change by engaging in more sustainable behaviors, consumer behavior experts note the "say-do" gap between expressed intention and behavior. How do we explain this? What, if anything, can consumers be encouraged to do to close this gap and purchase sustainable products and services? Inspiring Green Consumer Choices explains the factors that underlie the discrepancy between consumers' expressed preferences and their incongruous behavior in the marketplace. Drawing from advances in neuroscience, behavioral economics and experimental psychology, the author reveals how marketplace behavior is not always rational. Instead it is frequently the product of mental shortcuts, triggered by situational cues and colored by implicit emotional responses. In making purchasing decisions, routine consumer behavior is governed less by intention than by mental habits and unconscious response biases.These tendencies are difficult (but not impossible) to change. Inspiring Green Consumer Choices outlines how techniques such as psychological framing, design of choice architectures and pricing strategy can be used to disrupt habits and promote sustainable behavior. The author also addresses the role that legislative policy and changing social norms can play in accelerating and sustaining behavior change. Illustrated with case studies and filled with best practices, Inspiring Green Consumer Choices helps marketers understand how consumers make purchase decisions in order to shift consumption choices towards a more sustainable future.

While many consumers profess a desire to help end climate change by engaging in more sustainable behaviors, consumer behavior experts note the "say-do" gap between expressed intention and behavior. How do we explain this? What, if anything, can consumers be encouraged to do to close this gap and purchase sustainable products and services? Inspiring Green Consumer Choices explains the factors that underlie the discrepancy between consumers' expressed preferences and their incongruous behavior in the marketplace. Drawing from advances in neuroscience, behavioral economics and experimental psychology, the author reveals how marketplace behavior is not always rational. Instead it is frequently the product of mental shortcuts, triggered by situational cues and colored by implicit emotional responses. In making purchasing decisions, routine consumer behavior is governed less by intention than by mental habits and unconscious response biases.These tendencies are difficult (but not impossible) to change. Inspiring Green Consumer Choices outlines how techniques such as psychological framing, design of choice architectures and pricing strategy can be used to disrupt habits and promote sustainable behavior. The author also addresses the role that legislative policy and changing social norms can play in accelerating and sustaining behavior change. Illustrated with case studies and filled with best practices, Inspiring Green Consumer Choices helps marketers understand how consumers make purchase decisions in order to shift consumption choices towards a more sustainable future.

Well established in its first two editions as the leading text in the field, Issues in World Politics takes a truly global perspective on the major challenges in 21st century international relations. Systematically revised and updated throughout with the addition of a major new chapter on international terrorism by Tim Dunne, the third edition provides an ideal introduction to the key challenges for a fast-changing world.

Well established in its first two editions as the leading text in the field, Issues in World Politics takes a truly global perspective on the major challenges in 21st century international relations. Systematically revised and updated throughout with the addition of a major new chapter on international terrorism by Tim Dunne, the third edition provides an ideal introduction to the key challenges for a fast-changing world.

The Aztecs brings to life one of the best-known indigenous civilizations of the Americas in a vivid, comprehensive account of the ancient Aztecs. A thorough examination of Aztec origins and civilization including religion, science, and thoughtIncorporates the latest archaeological excavations and research into explanations of the Spanish conquest and the continuity of Aztec culture in Central MexicoExpanded coverage includes key topics such as writing, music, royal tombs, and Aztec predictions of the end of the world