Secret Judgments of God

Secret Judgments of God
Author: Noble David Cook
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
Total Pages: 316
Release: 2001
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780806133775

In the wake of European expansion, disease outbreaks in the New World caused the greatest loss of life known to history. Post-contact Native American inhabitants succumbed in staggering numbers to maladies such as smallpox, measles, influenza, and typhus, against which they had no immunity. A collection of case studies by historians, geographers, and anthropologists, "Secret Judgments of God" discusses how diseases with Old World origins devastated vulnerable native populations throughout Spanish America. In their preface to the paperback edition, the editors discuss the ongoing, often heated debate about contact population history.

Fiscal Federalism and Political Decentralization

Fiscal Federalism and Political Decentralization
Author: Nuria Bosch
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
Total Pages: 279
Release: 2008-01-01
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1848442718

This highly original book analyzes political decentralization and fiscal federalism in Canada and Germany, both traditional federal countries, and in Spain, a unitarian country engaged in the last two decades in a process of decentralization. The three key issues required for a well designed financing system are analyzed in depth herein, namely: tax assignment, equalization grants (i.e. redistribution of money from the wealthy regions or the national government to poorer regions) and the role of regional government in the administration of taxes. Fiscal Federalism and Political Decentralization will be of particular interest to academics and researchers of economics, public economics, public finance and public choice. It will also appeal to politicians and policy makers as well as organizations and agencies related to the economy and fiscal federalism.

Plant Conservation and Biodiversity

Plant Conservation and Biodiversity
Author: David L. Hawksworth
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 421
Release: 2007-09-18
Genre: Science
ISBN: 1402064446

Original studies address key aspects of the conservation and biodiversity of plants. Articles are all peer-reviewed primary research papers, contributed by leading biodiversity researchers from around the world. Collectively, these articles provide a snapshot of the major issues and activities in global plant conservation. Many of the articles can serve as excellent case studies for courses in ecology, restoration, biodiversity, and conservation.

Agrarian Extractivism in Latin America

Agrarian Extractivism in Latin America
Author: Ben M. McKay
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 183
Release: 2021-05-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 1000390527

Amid the growing calls for a turn towards sustainable agriculture, this book puts forth and discusses the concept of agrarian extractivism to help us identify and expose the predatory extractivist features of dominant agricultural development models. The concept goes beyond the more apparent features of monocultures and raw material exports to examine the inherent logic and underlying workings of a model based on the appropriation of an ever-growing range of commodified and non-commodified human and non-human nature in an extractivist fashion. Such a process erodes the autonomy of resourcedependent working people, dispossesses the rural poor, exhausts and expropriates nature, and concentrates value in a few hands as a result of the unquenchable drive for profit by big business. In many instances, such extractivist dynamics are subsidized and/or directly supported by the state, while also dependent on the unpaid, productive, and reproductive labour of women, children, and elders, exacerbating unequal class, gender, and generational relations. Rather than a one-size-fits-all definition of agrarian extractivism, this collection points to the diversity of extractivist features of corporate-led, external-input-dependent plantation agriculture across distinct socio-ecological formations in Latin America. This timely challenge to the destructive dominant models of agricultural development will interest scholars, activists, researchers, and students from across the fields of critical development studies, rural studies, environmental and sustainability studies, and Latin American studies, among others.

Disorientations

Disorientations
Author: Susan Martin-Márquez
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 456
Release: 2008-10-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0300152523

Exploring the fraught processes of Spaniards' efforts to formulate a national identity - from the Enlightenment to the present - this book focuses on the nation's Islamic-African legacy, disputing the received wisdom that Spain has consistently rejected its historical relationship to Muslims and Africans.