Explore the vast range of titles available.

The adaptive evolution of cultural ecosystems is a distinctive process along the Silk Road in China, involving the transitional interaction of nature and culture. This study aims to provide theoretical recommendations for the management of cultural heritage sites along the Silk Road to assess the values and keep the balance between tourism development and cultural heritage protection. The paper focuses on 22 cultural sites in western China to study the adaptive evolution pattern of cultural landscapes along the Silk Road with landscape changes and the transmission patterns of modern cultural tourism. Based on relevant literature reviews, historical maps, and geomorphological maps, the factors influencing the evolution of the cultural ecosystem are explored. We present both the theoretical and managerial implications: the cultural heritage of the urban areas can vigorously develop the cultural tourism with a high degree of industrialization, suburban areas can boost up traditional tourism product routes. We also assume that the degree of development of cultural tourism depends on the cultural ecosystem service and the environmental status of the cultural landscape.

Silk manufacturing began in Lucca in the twelfth century and by the fifteenth century Italy had become the largest producer of silk textiles in Europe, nurtured by extensive domestic and foreign demand for the luxurious fabric. This essay explores the market for silk textiles, the organization of the silk industry, and the role played in it by guilds, entrepreneurs and their capital, and highly sought after artisans. Just as silk manufacturing was an important and lucrative business for entrepreneurs, this article argues, so was it a crucial strategic activity for the governments of Italy's Renaissance states, whose incentives, protections, and investments helped to start up and grow the sector with the aim of generating wealth and strengthening their respective economies.

The aim of this article is to describe the role played by accounting in an industrial company in which elements of utopian socialism and capitalism co-existed. The case is the Royal Silk Factory founded by King Ferdinand IV at San Leucio, near Caserta in 1778. The article covers the years 1802-1826. In this hybrid institution, double-entry bookkeeping (DEB) was adopted to calculate the minimum profit rate owed to the capitalist shareholders, while 'labour accounting' measured the workers' performance. The surplus value was shared between the enterprise and the workers. This article makes a number of contributions to the accounting history literature: First, it adds archival evidence of accounting practices in Italian industrial companies; second, it supports the close connection between DEB and capitalism; third, it shows that the accounting system is set up to reflect the different social organisation of a manufacturing company; and finally, it illustrates how the accounting system makes the wealth-generating and wealth-distributing processes accountable.

Joseph Allatin remembered losing his favorite hat to the wind as his ship pulled away from the shore. Maria Cacciapaglia recalled her mother wrapping her in a shawl to stay warm in the damp recesses of steerage. When her father, a garment worker in New York City, came back to retrieve his family in 1924, \"he brought beautiful dresses for all of us including my mom, and we boarded the Guiseppe Verdi from Palermo and came to America.\" As the stories in this study demonstrate, clothing was simultaneously a public declaration of one's social, cultural, and economic self and an intimate object, worn on the body. Here, Casey and Clemente bring to light the diversity of the Italian immigrant experience and challenge long-held notions of these newcomers as ragtag greenhorns with limited knowledge of American social and cultural mores.

Recent research on twentieth-century German history has begun to re-examine the centrality of race as a category of analysis. While not discounting its importance in the shaping and enacting of Nazi policies and practices, race is seen instead as one among many factors leading to the crimes of the Nazi regime. In this paper, the author considers the role consumerist desires and fantasies played in the wider context of the inter-war European fascination with notions of technology, \"hygiene,\" democracy, and modernity. Using advertisements that were created to promote manufactured-fiber (rayon) apparel, this article suggests that continuities across cultures and time periods necessitate a re-evaluation of race as the signal organizing principal. Instead, the author argues that by complicating the intersections between class, science and technology, and an emerging, but troubling, modernity, 1920s rayon advertising offers an especially rich site for analysis of the ways in which biopolitics and nascent consumerism both sold products and constructed ideologies before 1933, and influenced the post-war welfare state.

The point of departure here is three significant textiles and clothing cultures: China, India and Europe, and the common thread is how fashions and traditions have travelled through space and time. In this richly illustrated anthology, with its 242 images, written both by textile researchers and practitioners as well as scholars from other fields across the globe, we hear of various types of encounters that bring to life a world of interactions and consequences as colourful as the textiles themselves. Among the 33 contributions we learn of an historian of ancient Roman textiles who has an intellectual epiphany in the streets of modern Iran; of 17th-century European Jesuits spreading the Gospel in Asia who attire themselves in the clothing suitable to their host countries; a visiting Siamese delegation that unwittingly creates fashion in 18th-century France;; how Chinese textile technology changed as a result of encountering textile patterns along the silk road; how political messages are conveyed in the sari; how Maharajahs inspired global pop culture; and the value we ascribe to old clothing. Recurrent themes include how religious praxis is informed by textile encounters; how travelling textiles enable patterns and symbols to be copied onto stone and metals; and textile motifs that acquire other symbolic meanings in their travels and encounters with different societies. This sensibly priced, highly readable, paperback, edited by three eminent textile scholars from Europe, China and India, is aimed at the interested general public and students. A Chinese version will be published by Donghua University Press in China.

In the late Nineteenth-century, the Japanese embarked on a program of westernization in the hope of building a strong and modern nation. Science, technology and medicine played an important part, showing European nations that Japan was a world power worthy of respect. It has been acknowledged that state policy was important in the development of industries but how well-organized was the state and how close were government-business relations? The book seeks to answer these questions and others. The first part deals with the role of science and medicine in creating a healthy nation. The second part of the book is devoted to examining the role of technology, and business-state relations in building a modern nation.

Considerable research attention has focused on truly ancient symbols of the Silk Road, the persistence of traditional raw silk production in China, the viability of hand-reeled silk, and the evolution of the silk industries. The material gathered in this study provides a rich and diverse context for understanding techniques for weaving and embroidering silk, the competitiveness of handicraft silk, the historical role of raw silk, and the economic importance of Byzantine silk exports all over the world.

This article examines debates about the merits of a boycott of Japanese products, especially silk, in the late 1930s as a lens through which to examine the relationship between consumer activism and consumer society in the United States. It argues that both supporters and opponents of the silk boycott, in promoting a politics that was both virtuous and pleasurable, marked a departure from the dominant tradition of consumer activism before and since, which has defined virtue and fashion as opposing forces. As the article shows, the silk boycotters (and their opponents) took fashion and pleasure seriously and embedded their campaigns in popular culture.