Global Exchange


Book Description

For courses in Freshman Composition and English. Global reader integrates readings, images, and internet resources, and is designed to help students think and write like a global citizen. It encourages students to step back to view America and other cultures in a broader context.




Global Exchanges


Book Description

Exchanges between different cultures and institutions of learning have taken place for centuries, but it was only in the twentieth century that such efforts evolved into formal programs that received focused attention from nation-states, empires and international organizations. Global Exchanges provides a wide-ranging overview of this underresearched topic, examining the scope, scale and evolution of organized exchanges around the globe through the twentieth century. In doing so it dramatically reveals the true extent of organized exchange and its essential contribution for knowledge transfer, cultural interchange, and the formation of global networks so often taken for granted today.




Tokens of Exchange


Book Description

The problem of translation has become increasingly central to critical reflections on modernity and its universalizing processes. Approaching translation as a symbolic and material exchange among peoples and civilizations—and not as a purely linguistic or literary matter, the essays in Tokens of Exchange focus on China and its interactions with the West to historicize an economy of translation. Rejecting the familiar regional approach to non-Western societies, contributors contend that “national histories” and “world history” must be read with absolute attention to the types of epistemological translatability that have been constructed among the various languages and cultures in modern times. By studying the production and circulation of meaning as value in areas including history, religion, language, law, visual art, music, and pedagogy, essays consider exchanges between Jesuit and Protestant missionaries and the Chinese between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries and focus on the interchanges occasioned by the spread of capitalism and imperialism. Concentrating on ideological reciprocity and nonreciprocity in science, medicine, and cultural pathologies, contributors also posit that such exchanges often lead to racialized and essentialized ideas about culture, sexuality, and nation. The collection turns to the role of language itself as a site of the universalization of knowledge in its contemplation of such processes as the invention of Basic English and the global teaching of the English language. By focusing on the moments wherein meaning-value is exchanged in the translation from one language to another, the essays highlight the circulation of the global in the local as they address the role played by historical translation in the universalizing processes of modernity and globalization. The collection will engage students and scholars of global cultural processes, Chinese studies, world history, literary studies, history of science, and anthropology, as well as cultural and postcolonial studies. Contributors. Jianhua Chen, Nancy Chen, Alexis Dudden Eastwood, Roger Hart, Larissa Heinrich, James Hevia, Andrew F. Jones, Wan Shun Eva Lam, Lydia H. Liu, Deborah T. L. Sang, Haun Saussy, Q. S. Tong, Qiong Zhang




Global Exchange and Poverty


Book Description

Economists from eastern and western Europe, the US, and Argentina examine national policies on the exchange of goods and services, money, and labor and the impact that such policies have on both the international flow and the domestic economies of affected countries. Their topics include the impact of technical barriers to trade on Argentina exports and labor markets, trade liberalization in southeastern Europe, effects of host-country migration policies on how Romanian remittances from the European Union impact poverty, possible skill diffusion by workers returning to European Union accession countries after working temporarily in western Europe, the effect of policies on foreign direct investment flows to transition countries, and empirical evidence from transition countries on whether foreign ownership matters for enterprise training.




Mongol Court Dress, Identity Formation, and Global Exchange


Book Description

The Mongol period (1206-1368) marked a major turning point of exchange – culturally, politically, and artistically – across Eurasia. The wide-ranging international exchange that occurred during the Mongol period is most apparent visually through the inclusion of Mongol motifs in textile, paintings, ceramics, and metalwork, among other media. Eiren Shea investigates how a group of newly-confederated tribes from the steppe conquered the most sophisticated societies in existence in less than a century, creating a courtly idiom that permanently changed the aesthetics of China and whose echoes were felt across Central Asia, the Middle East, and even Europe. This book will be of interest to scholars in art history, fashion design, and Asian studies.




Global Ecology and Unequal Exchange


Book Description

In modern society, we tend to have faith in technology. But is our concept of ‘technology’ itself a cultural illusion? This book challenges the idea that humanity as a whole is united in a common development toward increasingly efficient technologies. Instead it argues that modern technology implies a kind of global ‘zero-sum game’ involving uneven resource flows, which make it possible for wealthier parts of global society to save time and space at the expense of humans and environments in the poorer parts. We tend to think of the functioning of machines as if it was detached from the social relations of exchange which make machines economically and physically possible (in some areas). But even the steam engine that was the core of the Industrial Revolution in England was indissolubly linked to slave labour and soil erosion in distant cotton plantations. And even as seemingly benign a technology as railways have historically saved time (and accessed space) primarily for those who can afford them, but at the expense of labour time and natural space lost for other social groups with less purchasing power. The existence of technology, in other words, is not a cornucopia signifying general human progress, but the unevenly distributed result of unequal resource transfers that the science of economics is not equipped to perceive. Technology is not simply a relation between humans and their natural environment, but more fundamentally a way of organizing global human society. From the very start it has been a global phenomenon, which has intertwined political, economic and environmental histories in complex and inequitable ways. This book unravels these complex connections and rejects the widespread notion that technology will make the world sustainable. Instead it suggests a radical reform of money, which would be as useful for achieving sustainability as for avoiding financial breakdown. It brings together various perspectives from environmental and economic anthropology, ecological economics, political ecology, world-system analysis, fetishism theory, semiotics, environmental and economic history, and development theory. Its main contribution is a new understanding of technological development and concerns about global sustainability as questions of power and uneven distribution, ultimately deriving from the inherent logic of general-purpose money. It should be of interest to students and professionals with a background or current engagement in anthropology, sustainability studies, environmental history, economic history, or development studies.




Contact and Exchange in the Ancient World


Book Description

Do civilizations independently invent themselves or are they the result of cultural diffusion? The contributors to this volume do not attempt to provide a definitive answer to this contentious question, one of the most debated issues of the past century. Instead, they shift the focus from theory to reality by presenting empirical evidence on a wide range of cultural phenomena in history and prehistory, thereby demonstrating the processes whereby cultural traits are acquired and modified—the dynamics of transmission and transformation. The range of topics covered in this volume is of extraordinary breadth: the distribution of belt hooks and belts from the steppes to North and Central China; textile exchange in the third millennium B.C.; the spread of bronze metallurgy across Asia; the adaptation of complicated technologies by distant peoples; the mechanisms whereby bronze implements were used to convey political messages in East Asia; the ethnogenesis of the Turks; the complex interrelationships among migratory and settled peoples in western Central Asia during the Bronze Age; the origins of the enigmatic Chinese goddess known as Queen Mother of the West; an account of hunting with trained cheetahs; and the use of abundant botanical and zoological evidence to affirm that the Old World and the New World must have been in contact long before the fifteenth century. Rounding out the volume is a survey of the problem of modernocentrism.




Managing Global Financial and Foreign Exchange Rate Risk


Book Description

A comprehensive guide to managing global financial risk From the balance of payment exposure to foreign exchange and interest rate risk, to credit derivatives and other exotic options, futures, and swaps for mitigating and transferring risk, this book provides a simple yet comprehensive analysis of complex derivatives pricing and their application in risk management. The risk posed by foreign exchange transactions stems from the volatility of the exchange rate, the volatility of the interest rates, and factors unique to individual companies which are interrelated. To protect and hedge against adverse currency and interest rate changes, multinational corporations need to take concrete steps for mitigating these risks. Managing Global Financial and Foreign Exchange Rate Risk offers a thorough treatment of price, foreign currency, and interest rate risk management practices of multinational corporations in a dynamic global economy. It lays out the pros and cons of various hedging instruments, as well as the economic cost benefit analysis of alternative hedging vehicles. Written in a detailed yet user–friendly manner, this resource provides treasurers and other financial managers with the tools they need to manage their various exposures to credit, price, and foreign exchange risk. Managing Global Financial and Foreign Exchange Rate Risk covers various swaps in this geometrically growing field with notional principal in excess of $120 trillion. From caplet and corridors to call and put swaptions this book covers the micro structure of the swaps, options, futures, and foreign exchange markets. From credit default swap and transfer and convertibility options to asset swap switch and weather derivatives this book illustrates their simple pricing and application. To show real-world examples, each chapter includes a case study highlighting a specific problem, as well as a set of steps to solve it. Numerous charts accompanied with actual Wall Street figures provide the reader with the opportunity to comprehend and appreciate the role and function of derivatives, which are often misunderstood in the financial market. This detailed resource will guide the individual, government and multinational corporations safely through the maze of various exposures. A must-read for treasures, controllers, money mangers, portfolio managers, security analyst and academics, Managing Global Financial and Foreign Exchange Rate Risk represents an important collection of up-to-date risk management solutions. Ghassem A. Homaifar is a professor of financial economics at Middle Tennessee State University. He has Master of Science in Industrial Management from State University of New York at Stony Brook and PhD in Finance from University of Alabama in 1982. He is the author of numerous articles that have appeared in the Journal of Risk and Insurance, Journal of Business Finance and Accounting, Weltwirtschsftliches Archiv Review of World Economics, Advances in Futures and Options Research,Applied Financial Economics, Applied Economics, International Economics, and Global Finance Journal.




Cinema of Collaboration


Book Description

From their very inception, European cinemas undertook collaborative ventures in an attempt to cultivate a transnational “Film-Europe.” In the postwar era, it was DEFA, the state cinema of East Germany, that emerged as a key site for cooperative practices. Despite the significant challenges that the Cold War created for collaboration, DEFA sought international prestige through various initiatives. These ranged from film exchange in occupied Germany to partnerships with Western producers, and from coproductions with Eastern European studios to strategies for film co-authorship. Uniquely positioned between East and West, DEFA proved a crucial mediator among European cinemas during a period of profound political division.




Against Autonomy


Book Description

This book investigates "cultural instruments," meaning normative forms of analysis and practice that are central to Western culture. It explores their history from antiquity to the early Enlightenment and their use and reworking by different cultures, moving from Europe to Africa and the Americas, especially the Caribbean, in the process giving close readings of a wide range of authors.