History Middle East Books

A Pilgrimage to Nejd, the Cradle of the Arab Race is an inspiring 2-volume historical and travel account of the journey in the Middle East based on the journals of Lady Anne Blunt edited by her husband and companion Wilfrid, first published in 1881. Nejd, in the imagination of the Bedouins of the North, is a region of romance, the cradle of their race and of their ideas of chivalry. This carefully crafted e-artnow ebook is formatted for your eReader with a functional and detailed table of contents."We spent a week at Damascus, a week not altogether of pleasure, although it was to be our last of civilised life. We had an immense number of things to buy and arrange and think over, before starting on so serious a journey as this, which we knew must be very unlike the pleasure trip of last year. We could not afford to leave anything to chance with the prospect of a three months' wandering, and a thousand miles of desert, where it was impossible to count upon fresh supplies even of the commonest necessaries of life. Jôf, the first station on our road, was four hundred miles off, and then we must cross the Nefûd, with its two hundred miles of sand, before we could get to Nejd. The return journey, too, to the Persian Gulf, would have to be made without coming to anything so European as a Turkish town. Nobody could tell us what supplies were to be had in Nejd, beyond dates and corn. Mr. Palgrave's account of Jebel Shammar was, in fact, the only guide we had to go on, and its accuracy had been so much doubted that we felt obliged to take into consideration the possibility of finding the Nejd towns mere oases, and their cultivation only that of the date."

This open access book asks why and how some of the developing countries have “emerged” under a set of similar global conditions, what led individual countries to choose the particular paths that led to their “emergence,” and what challenges confront them. If we are to understand the nature of major risks and uncertainties in the world, we must look squarely at the political and economic dynamics of emerging states, such as China, India, Brazil, Russia, and ASEAN countries. Their rapid economic development has changed the distribution of wealth and power in the world. Yet many of them have middle income status. To global governance issues, they tend to adopt approaches that differ from those of advanced industrialized democracies. At home, rapid economic growth and social changes put pressure on their institutions to change. This volume traces the historical trajectories of two major emerging states, China and India, and two city states, Hong Kong and Singapore. It also analyzes cross-country data to find the general patterns of economic development and sociopolitical change in relation to globalization and to the middle income trap.