Author: Benjamin Kingsbury File Type: pdf The storm came on the night of 31 October. It was a full moon, and the tides were at their peak the great rivers of eastern Bengal were full of monsoon rain. In the early hours the inhabitants of the coast and islands were overtaken by an immense wave from the Bay of Bengal -- a wall of water that reached a height of 40 feet in some places. The wave swept away everything in its path, drowning around 215,000 people. At least another 100,000 died in the cholera epidemic and famine that followed. It was the worst calamity of its kind in recorded history. Such events are often described as natural disasters. Kingsbury turns that interpretation on its head, showing that the cyclone of 1876 was not simply a natural event, but one shaped by all-too-human patterns of exploitation and inequality -- by divisions within Bengali society, and the enormous disparities of political and economic power that characterized British rule on the subcontinent. With Bangladesh facing rising sea levels and stronger, more frequent storms, there is every reason to revisit this terrible calamity. An Imperial Disaster is troubling but essential reading history for an age of climate change. **About the Author Benjamin Kingsbury was born in Auckland in 1987, and brought up in New Zealand and Pakistan. Since then he has lived in both India and Bangladesh. He has taught history at Victoria University of Wellington, and now works as a historian for the New Zealand government. This is his first book.

Author: Randy Martin File Type: epub While trillions of dollars came and went in the stock market boom of the 1990s, the image of every man and woman a CEO may turn out to be the eras lasting legacy. Business news, once reserved to specialized papers or sections of the larger news of the day, came to the forefront in cable television and in cultural images of how ordinary people, through the internet and other avenues could not only master their financial life, but move money and equity around with the ease of a financial titan. Financialization of Daily Life looks at how this transformation occurred, and how it is just now becoming a significant, and troubling, aspect of our political and cultural life.Randy Martin takes us through all of the aspects of our financialization. He examines how the shift in economic life arose not only from changes in culture, but also from new policy priorities that emphasize controlling inflation over promoting growth. He offers a close reading of self-help literature that teaches parents how to rear financially literate children and to instruct adults in the fundamentals of fiscal management. He examines just what a society that treats financial investment as a national past time really looks like, and how that society is transforming the world.In a country rocked by scandals in accounting and banking, the identification ordinary citizens make with, and the risk with which they engage in, the stock market calls into question the very basis of our economic system. Randy Martin spells out in clear terms the implications our financial doingsand undoinghave for the way we organize our lives, and, especially, our money.

Author: John Ruskin File Type: pdf

Author: Ken Ireland File Type: pdf Thomas Hardy, Time and Narrative is the first book-length study of all Hardys fourteen novels from narratological perspectives. It examines how his development of thematics and characters over a quarter of a century is matched by a corresponding development of narrative devices and techniques, and his handling of time. As a transitional writer between the fragmenting Victorian and advancing Modernist periods, Hardys key role is here reinforced in technical as well as in thematic terms, and exposure of the internal workings of his novels helps towards a fuller appreciation of their achievement. Featuring constant change, Hardys novels question convention, stress discontinuity and multiplicity of focus and genre, while inconsistent narrators force the reader into a pivotal position, and devices of simultaneity and epiphany, chronotope and coincidence project an intense awareness of time. Overall, this study aims to underline the need for a healthy balance between the rival claims of content and expression. **