Robert G. Williams – författare

Before social unrest shook the region in the 1970s, Central America experienced more than a decade of rapid export growth by adding cotton and beef to the traditional coffee and bananas. Williams shows how the rapid growth contributed to the present social and political crisis, examines the causes of the export boom and who benefited from it, and shows the impact of the boom on land use, the ecology, and the conditions of life in the rural areas.

The national governments of Central America were constructed between 1840 and 1900, a time when coffee was transformed from a botanical curiosity to the region's most important export. In spite of their geographic proximity, the national governments that emerged were strikingly different, from Costa Rica's participatory democracy to Guatemala's military despotism. Robert Williams explores Central America's political diversity by following the story of coffee through the nation-building period. With a sensitivity to cultures and institutions before the advent of widespread coffee cultivation, he reveals the various ways that land, labor, and capital were harnessed as coffee advanced from one locale to the next, provoking cultural clashes and sometimes violent reactions as it altered landscapes, people's lives, and even governments. Through careful scrutiny of a tiny region and a single crop in a restless age, States and Social Evolution develops a theory of state formation relevant to other places and times as well.

This volume describes and evaluates the major current research developments in the ocean sciences. Topics include advances in measuring ocean phenomena from space, ^Iin situ^R instruments, and the development of fully integrated observing systems that allow investigators to take environmental snapshots of areas that must be monitored in order to protect property and save lives. The authors emphasize that today's successful oceanographic programs rely on multidisciplinary, integrated, and task-organized teams of varying professionals, marine technicians, and oceanographers.Also discussed are the World Wide Web, distributed databases, and computer models that allow research and operational oceanographers to share information to build useful products and make new discoveries.

At almost $2 trillion per day in trades, currency markets vitally link the world together. Yet few people understand how they work and why they are prone to instability and bouts of panic. This book takes the reader behind the scenes on a tour of the places, the machines, the circuitry and the people involved in moving world money.This journey begins as a traveler removes foreign currency from an ATM machine in Istanbul. The author guides us from the periphery of the market into its neural centers in financial hubs such as London and New York. Currency traders, market analysts, money managers and payments systems architects show their workplaces and reveal their day-to-day experiences in this unpredictable and rapidly evolving world.The experts interviewed may use unfamiliar terms, but the logical progression of the chapters and participants' stories told in workplace settings bring abstract concepts down to earth. After completing the tour, the reader will have a clear picture of the geographical and structural organization of global currency markets and the people who run them. This vision of a volatile, evolving structure will provide a useful framework for deciphering the complex causes of yet unforeseen financial events.