bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Crack, Community Policing, and Crown Heights (1980–1993)
Authors: Moskos Peter
Published: February 2025

In the 1980s and early 1990s, New York City was on more solid economic footing, and the city’s population began to increase after decades of decline. The number of police officers reached an all-time low in 1981. In that same year, robberies reached an all-time high. As the city’s financial situation improved in the first half of the 1980s, crime declined. The NYPD shifted to a focus on “community policing,” and the number of arrests increased drastically along with crime and violence, the latter heavily linked to public dealing of crack cocaine, which significantly and disproportionately impacted minority communities. Riots in Crown Heights targeting the Jewish community showed that the police department was unable to deal with issues of urban unrest. A number of high-profile crimes provoked Mayor Dinkins’s Safe Streets Safe City program, which in 1990 that paid for the hiring of thousands of police officers.
Compstat: Accurate Timely Intelligence (1994–1996)
Authors: Moskos Peter
Published: February 2025

Weekly crime meetings, known as Compstat, came to symbolize the cultural transformation of the NYPD into a proactive and aggressive crime-fighting organization. Previously, the NYPD had neither the system nor the desire to compile and examine such data on a weekly basis. During the meetings, careers were made or lost. Precinct commanders were held accountable and given resources and ideas to fight crime. While the technology itself was little beyond the ability to map crime data, accurate data needed to be painstakingly gathered from every command in the city. This allowed Compstat meetings to focus on individual officers, individual criminal cases, and patterns and trends. Crime began to plummet in August 1994. This decline would accelerate in 1995.
Religion Is Good When . . .
Authors: Smith Christian
Published: February 2025

The chapter examines six key criteria that Americans use to evaluate religion: moral guidance, positive psychological support, community building, role modeling, moderation, and national solidarity. Religion is valued when it promotes good morals, helps individuals maintain a positive outlook, fosters social harmony, provides moral role models, remains moderate and non-extremist, and strengthens national unity. When religion meets these expectations, it is affirmed and supported; when it fails to do so, skepticism and disengagement follow. These criteria help explain traditional religion’s obsolescence, setting normative baselines that were later violated by religious actors and made impossible by changing sociocultural conditions.
Some Complex Ways Culture Changes
Authors: Smith Christian
Published: February 2025

This chapter advances several useful analogies of change to help explain the obsolescence of traditional American religion. In population ecology, factors like diseases and habitat loss contribute to species decline, just as how sociocultural changes and new influences affect religion. Avalanche science demonstrates how small disruptions can escalate into significant changes, paralleling how minor societal shifts can lead to widespread religious changes. Cultural mismatch, where clashing norms of students and schools can lead to student disadvantage and failure helps explain religion's decline. Nonlinear change, where effects accumulate before reaching a tipping point, reflects how religion’s decline can be sudden and dramatic. Everett Rogers’s innovation adoption curve illustrates how new beliefs spread across populations, similar to traditional religion losing ground to rival ways of life. Economic crowding out describes how competing demands reduce religion’s role, while Andrew Abbott’s theory explains how competitive claimants to knowledge and authority compete with traditional religious authority. These analogies help illustrate the dynamics of the complex, multifaceted nature of religion’s obsolescence in American society, as explained in following chapters.
Long-Term Social Trends
Authors: Smith Christian
Published: February 2025

This chapter explains how the obsolescence of traditional American religion since the early 1990s was shaped by long-term macro-social factors. The expansion of higher education since World War II, driven by the GI Bill and government subsidies, has increased college attendance. The rise in women’s workforce participation has diminished volunteer labor for religious congregations and reshaped traditional family structures, impacting religious involvement. Changing family dynamics, including delayed marriage, increased cohabitation, and higher rates of living alone, have further weakened traditional religion’s appeal. The decline in face-to-face membership organizations, including churches, also reflects a broader trend of reduced civic engagement. The rise of mass consumerism and advertising has shifted American values toward individualistic consumption and redefined notions of success and fulfillment. Meanwhile, expressive individualism, which emphasizes personal authenticity, has become dominant in the late twentieth century. The cultural shift from materialist to postmaterialist values has further contributed to the decline of traditional religion. Last, the rise of emerging adulthood, characterized by extended education and delayed commitments, contrasts with traditional religion’s focus on stability and community, leading to reduced religious engagement among younger generations.
The Developing Religious Environment
Authors: Smith Christian
Published: February 2025

This chapter addresses changes in American religion over decades that help explain traditional religion’s weaknesses heading into the 1990s. These include the organizational decline of mainline Protestantism, which paradoxically stems from its larger cultural successes. Liberal Protestant values such as individualism, pluralism, and tolerance became so integrated into American culture that the need for these churches diminished, leading to membership losses after the 1960s. The American Catholic Church faced similar challenges after reforms from the Second Vatican Council, which caused internal conflict and declining resources. Meanwhile, evangelicalism gained strength in the 1970s, polarizing religion and politics through televangelism and the Religious Right. By the 1990s, increased interest in Eastern religions, the New Age movement, and perceived conflicts between science and religion further accelerated the decline of traditional religious institutions.
Contours of the Millennial Zeitgeist
Authors: Smith Christian
Published: February 2025

This chapter uses multiple means to explore how the Millennial cultural zeitgeist that emerged in the 1990s through the 2000s both contributed to and represented the obsolescence of traditional religion. The optimism and innovation of the 1990s gave way to economic instability and political conflict in the 2000s. As the internet rose and new cultural values emphasized individuality, fluid identity, and personal subjectivism, traditional religion increasingly seemed irrelevant. Millennials, influenced by these changes, became skeptical of institutional authority, viewing religious institutions as hypocritical and controlling. This was reflected in music, attire, attitudes, and values. Many turned to alternative “re-enchanted” spiritual practices or engaged with “occulture” rather than adhering to traditional frameworks. This loss in traditional religious commitment was not primarily replaced by secularism but by a larger rise in eclectic, non-traditional spiritual beliefs and practices. Traditional religion meanwhile failed to resonate with contemporary values centered on personal experience, diversity, relativism, and individualism.
Conclusion
Authors: Smith Christian
Published: February 2025

This concluding chapter emphasizes the importance of sociological realism in understanding religious change, showing that significant transformations, including the obsolescence of traditional religion, arise from long-term trends and institutional forces. It also challenges traditional secularization theory as explaining the current case, arguing that while traditional religion has declined, new forms of spirituality and occult practices have emerged that are anything but secularist. This conclusion then questions the notion of cyclical religious revivals, arguing that contemporary forces are accelerating traditional religion’s decline rather than reversing it. Religious institutions are caught in many no-win situations, struggling to adapt without appearing insincere or outdated, making it unlikely that traditional American religion will regain prominence anytime soon. This situation may present an opportunity for traditional religion to undergo profound self-reflection and transformation, although such efforts would be risky and may lead to further losses.
Tropical Leviathan
Authors: 9780192550965  , Graham Aaron
Published: February 2025

Planters in Jamaica, as in other slave societies, faced formidable problems of security. This study is the first to examine the role of the colonial fiscal-military state, the ‘tropical leviathan’, in the slave society of Jamaica during the age of revolutions between 1770 and 1840. Bringing together separate historiographies of state formation and slavery, it offers for the first time the study of a complete early modern fiscal-military state which recognizes the interactions between its different components, and the role of political structures in regulating this process and in mediating between the state and colonial society. Building on new models of the economy and politics of Jamaica under slavery, it argues that planters and other interests created a colonial state that successfully addressed their terror of slave resistance and their need for security by sowing fear among the Black population. Looking at policing, contracting, and the use of force, it shows how new structures were developed to fight a ‘tropical way of war’ in the interior, and to control the influx of White and Black refugees and prisoners of war after the Haitian Revolution in 1791, and the fiscal and financial expedients that were required as spending grew beyond precedent. Engaging with recent work on the end of slavery, it concludes that this process eventually bankrupted the island, bringing about the fall of the colonial state and triggering emancipation in the British empire in 1833.
Introduction
Authors: Graham Aaron
Published: February 2025

Previous work on state formation in early modern Britain and Europe has largely ignored the colonial experience, largely because it is focused on the rise of large bureaucratic institutions for fiscal-military business. Examining instead the various other ways that the planters in Jamaica exercised power is a more productive way of understanding the process of state formation. Examining this in its wider contexts, both as a complementary part of the British fiscal-military state within a wider British Atlantic, and as an ‘entangled’ part of its immediate neighbourhood, likewise helps to clarify why the colonial state in Jamaica developed the way it did. In particular, the colonial state in Jamaica was shaped by the fact of slavery, and provided the means of suppressing resistance. However, recent studies of ‘slavery’s capitalism’ understate the complexities and expense of doing so, and the way that this use of violence incorporated other groups into the ruling elite. Studies of emancipation and the end of slavery have similarly failed to consider the role of the colonial state.
The Purposes of Power
Authors: Graham Aaron
Published: February 2025

This chapter outlines the nature of White and Black, free and enslaved society in Jamaica, before addressing the role that fear played as a driver of white actions, especially after 1791. Like the other plantation societies in the early modern Americas, society in Jamaica was built on racial differences, between a small free White elite, a growing number of free people of colour, and a vast number of enslaved Black people. This was a society based on fear: White elites were terrified of Black revolts. Both the frequency and magnitude of these intense moments of terror increased after 1770, particularly after the Haitian Revolution in 1791. This fear served to maintain White solidarity and cohesion, and to unify them around a set of policies which aimed to prevent black resistance by creating fear in turn, through the exercise of brutal violence but also through the mere threat of violence. They also used small privileges and crumbs of preferment which could be exploited to generate frictions and fissures within communities, disrupting social and political solidarity and therefore disrupting rebellions. The tropical leviathan, the colonial fiscal-military state, was the instrument used for this purpose.
The Levers of Power
Authors: Graham Aaron
Published: February 2025

The colonial state in Jamaica was an aspect of wider colonial society and its political structures, the ‘levers’ of power. Interest groups made their needs known through petitions and the public sphere, but mainly through political representation. In the colonial assembly, members attempted to reconcile these various aims and to find consensus, which could then be embodied in the legislation which raised manpower and money. Increasing amounts of legislation after 1770, and the greater efficiency with which it was produced, were therefore the basis of the expansion of the colonial state. The process even fed back on itself, with members refusing to exercise their powers until they could guarantee their control, and even leveraging their grants to demand that guarantee from imperial authorities. Building a colonial state therefore reflected the creation and maintenance of a colonial political consensus.
The Sinews of Power
Authors: Graham Aaron
Published: February 2025

The growing scale of the colonial state can be judged by the rise in taxation and spending, the ‘sinews’ of colonial power. Revenues rose almost fivefold after 1770, based on higher taxes and then on greater borrowing, all driven primarily by the need for internal and external security. The impact can be judged by considering public spending and taxation as a changing share of national income, which in turn requires the reconstruction of the economy of Jamaica for selected dates between 1730 and 1850. This indicates that the economy grew up to 1800, then stabilized in real terms, and only declined after 1830. However, the burden of taxation upon the economy continued to rise, even after 1815, until by 1830 it exceeded in real terms the burden in 1800. The colonial state therefore remained essentially upon a wartime footing up to 1832, which was felt by planters and other inhabitants as growing tax burdens and reduced profits or earnings.
Intermezzo I
Authors: Graham Aaron
Published: February 2025

The development of the colonial state in Jamaica after 1770 was fundamentally shaped by the need for security, against internal rebellion and external invasion. Until 1815 this was something on which both imperial and colonial interests could agree, reflecting the strong and to some extent exaggerated fears of planters, and they cooperated to build a colonial state that could meet these aims. Yet their aims never wholly overlapped, and although the Haitian Revolution in 1791 temporarily brought them together, areas of disagreement had already begun to emerge by the time the war ended in 1815. Thereafter, imperial authorities increasingly viewed Jamaica as a strategic backwater and political embarrassment, but the paranoia of planters and their fears of Haiti continued to grow, so the colonial state remained upon a wartime footing, despite the rising financial costs of security. Fear therefore fundamentally shaped the nature of the Jamaican colonial state.
Supplies
Authors: Graham Aaron
Published: February 2025

The assembly would have been unable to create a workable colonial state without the assistance of contractors, making it as much as ‘contractor state’ as a ‘fiscal-military’ one. Key functions, especially the construction of fortifications, the supply of provisions as part of the island pay, and the management of the military labourers or pioneers, were all managed by contractors. This enabled the assembly to tap into the knowledge, credit, and connections of local merchants, both for themselves and on behalf of the imperial state, to deal with the challenges of warfare in tropical conditions. Examining the efforts of contractors shows how the assembly and the colonial state developed mechanisms to oversee the contractors, in part because of growing pressure from constituents to prevent corruption and waste. On the whole, contractors appear as a result to have managed their business relatively honestly and efficiently, enabling the colonial state to make the most of its growing spending.
Fiscal
Authors: Graham Aaron
Published: February 2025

The increase in spending after 1770 forced the assembly to reassess its ‘fiscal constitution’ or the compact between taxpayers and the state. Taxpayers proved willing to shoulder the increased costs of the colonial state, but only if the money was spent for their own security, and in a transparent and equitable way. The years after the American Revolutionary War were therefore marked by a period of ‘economical reform’, mirroring that in Britain, as the assembly began to overhaul its fiscal structures to meet popular demands. It proved difficult to overhaul the collection of direct taxes, since that brought the assembly into conflict with the parish vestries, and even more difficult was the reform of indirect tax collection, which brought the assembly into conflict with the imperial government. Military spending therefore drove fiscal reform, often along bureaucratic lines, but was also shaped by the limits of the assembly’s political power in the face of other groups.
Public Credit
Authors: Graham Aaron
Published: February 2025

As tax revenues began to fall short of spending, the balance was increasingly made up by borrowing. This was initially short-term and piecemeal, but after the American Revolutionary War this debt was formalized, and many of the ‘economical reforms’ were aimed at improving the financial standing of the assembly. This enabled it to provide a ‘credible commitment’ to its lenders in Jamaica, based mainly upon the performance of credibility rather than the creation of formal institutions. This was then revived in 1796 after the Second Maroon War, and supported the colonial state into the 1830s. Its credibility remained rooted in informal measures, however, as the assembly found in 1832 when it attempted to borrow money to fund itself after the Baptist War. Neither its creditors nor the imperial government, whom it then approached for a loan, found its informal commitment credible, and the planters had to manipulate the British government to obtain the funds to bail them out.
Conclusion
Authors: Graham Aaron
Published: February 2025

Although the passage of the Emancipation Act in 1833 abolished everything that the colonial state in Jamaica had sought to preserve, it revived rapidly, not least because imperial and colonial interests recognized that they once again had a number of shared interests. The colonial state was used to control the newly emancipated population under the end of forced labour or apprenticeship in 1838, especially through the creation of a rural constabulary to impose labour discipline. As with the imperial garrison, this became a bone of contention between imperial and colonial interests, and the planters once again leveraged their political and financial powers to wrestle control of the force away from the governor. This points to important continuities and broader principles in the process of state (re)formation. In particular, it demonstrates the importance of viewing state formation as a political process, shaped by the capacity to build a consensus by political means between groups with different but overlapping interests and aims.
Resilient Forest Management
Authors: 9780198833000  , Burton Philip J.
Published: February 2025

Forests long have been important to humanity and other species of the planet, providing timber and non-timber resources, innumerable ecosystem services, and supporting biological diversity. The technical determination of requirements for a sustained yield of timber was a revolutionary achievement, which has since been extended to the sustainability of other aspects of forests and diverse human endeavors. Yet the expectations of stasis and constancy make sustainability difficult in a world undergoing rapid changes, necessitating a paradigm shift that accommodates uncertainty and embraces change. Resilience theory and the principles of complex adaptive systems provide a foundation for a resilient and adaptive approach to forest stewardship. The many services, uses, values, and expectations of forest often conflict with each other, requiring bundling into protection, multi-purpose, and timber zones. Applying resistance, recovery, adjustment, reconfiguration, or transformation strategies for resilient forest management is a place-based exercise, addressing local attributes, vulnerabilities, and priorities. Climate change and its stimulation of forest disturbances are priority challenges for which resilience planning and management is needed. The diversity, disturbance regimes, biological legacies, and spatial patterns of natural forests inspire an ecological forestry approach that has the greatest potential for supporting forest resilience, and ultimately the resilience of forest enterprises and forest communities. A long history of deforestation and forest degradation often requires forest restoration to make forests more resilient. With many unknowns and much uncertainty, resilient forest management takes place in an adaptive management context. Resilient forest stewardship is ultimately about people management and must take place within a supportive governance and sociocultural framework.
The Evolving Scope of Forest Management
Authors: Burton Philip J.
Published: February 2025

Forest management refers to the purposeful human manipulation and regulation of lands dominated by trees. Forested land has expanded and contracted over history, showing a natural capacity to recover and persist where climate is suitable. People have variously exploited and conserved forests for multiple goods and ecological services over time, with constraints often applied in response to local resource shortages. The formal determination of sustainable levels of timber available for harvest was an important breakthrough in resource management that has since been applied to many aspects of society. Different countries and regions around the world differ in the priority they place on forest protection, timber production, non-timber values, or forest multiple use. Forest area in parks and reserves has grown in recent decades, yet deforestation continues, and many remaining forests are degraded and are being replaced by simplified plantations. Forests can make important contributions to attaining the UN Sustainable Development Goals, but their stewardship must address the many facets of global change and growing socio-economic uncertainty in order to do so. In particular, with the planet now experiencing a joint crisis of biodiversity loss and a warming climate, a new paradigm for forest management is needed.
Forest Values and Zoning
Authors: Burton Philip J.
Published: February 2025

Forests are valued, appreciated, and depended upon for a wide range of ecosystem services that fill provisioning, supporting, regulating, and cultural roles. People vary in the priority they place on utilitarian or biocentric values and immediate or long-term considerations; such preferences can reflect culture and personality as well as local economic conditions. Forest planning and interventions tend to emphasize the tangible economic value of fiber resources, because they are the primary source of revenue associated with forest management. Yet biodiversity conservation, recreation, watershed protection, or non-timber forest products may be more important in the long run, or to a significant local constituency of stakeholders. As a primarily consumptive resource use (although potentially sustainable in the long run), commercial logging may or may not be compatible with a variety of other non-consumptive and intangible forest uses. Forest zoning following a triad template can reduce much of this conflict by assigning some lands to full protection and some to enhanced timber-production zones, while most land is variously managed for compatible multiple uses. Robust and inclusive governance models and stakeholder engagement can help generate creative zoning and forest management approaches and the social license to implement them.
Resilience Concepts
Authors: Burton Philip J.
Published: February 2025

Resilience refers to the ability of a social, engineered, or ecological system to absorb and recover from disruptions. Forests and forest species exhibit a wide array of attributes to exhibit resilience under their natural disturbance regime, but they may not persist if the natural range of variability in disruptive events is exceeded. Mechanisms of resilience include features that promote resistance, recovery, adjustment, restructuring, or eventual transformation. Buffering and regenerative capacity, flexibility, and component substitution or reconfiguration feature prominently along a gradient of resilient responses to stress and disruption. Those strategies vary in their importance during difference phases (growth or exploitation, conservation, disruption or release, and reorganization) of the adaptive cycle that characterizes development and change in so many socio-ecological systems. Guided system transformation into an alternative state can still sustain selected functions and values. Resilience is facilitated in complex adaptive systems by diversity, self-organization, novel opportunities, and a balance of modularity and connectedness. Examples of resilience and its promotion in many different disciplines provide templates for their application in forest management.
Fostering Climate Change Resilience
Authors: Burton Philip J.
Published: February 2025

Forests can provide important nature-based solutions to climate change by retaining and sequestering large amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. But they will also have to adapt to the inevitable consequences of a warming atmosphere, which will threaten the health, productivity, and stability of many forest regions. In protected areas and most multipurpose forests, maintaining a continuity of species and habitats over time and space will facilitate the inherent capacity of ecosystems to adjust through dispersal and adaptive filtering. Prioritizing high-carbon reservoirs (old-growth forests, peatlands) for protection, especially in locations expected to persist under a changing climate, can support both climate mitigation and biodiversity conservation. Ecosystem transformations in response to the changing climate may be acceptable, although domination by invasive exotic species is generally undesirable. Tree-species diversification has many benefits in all forests. Stand thinning likewise has broad utility in reducing moisture stress, improving habitat value, and reducing wildfire risk. Artificial regeneration in both multiple-use and production forests can practice climate-smart forestry by utilizing source materials (seeds, seedlings, cuttings) from locations currently experiencing climate expected to prevail locally in the future. Assisted migration of species as well as populations is also an option, especially in production forests. Using tree species to be harvested on short rotations or having more assured regeneration through vegetative sprouting are risk-reduction strategies for timber-production lands. A combination or gradient of resilience strategies can be applied in most forests, depending on local conditions and thresholds of acceptable change expressed by stakeholders.
Resilience to Forest Disturbances
Authors: Burton Philip J.
Published: February 2025

Ecological disturbances of various sizes are natural to all forests, but are increasing owing to climate change. Wildfires, windstorms, and outbreaks of herbivorous insects are especially widespread sources of damage to trees and timber supplies, but also leave biological legacies important to biodiversity. Disturbances can sometimes trigger a cascade of additional disturbances or can remove the fuel or food for further disturbance. Most disturbance management consists of resistance-enhancing approaches, such as fuel-reduction treatments and the installation of fuel breaks for wildfire risk reduction. Selective thinning (favoring retention of more fire-resistant trees), pruning, and the use of prescribed burning under cool conditions are common fuel-reduction treatments. Windthrow frequency can be reduced by selective thinning, retaining deep-rooted trees, shorter trees, or those with greater bole taper. Avoiding large clearcuts where adjacent stands are on exposed terrain, keeping cutblocks small, feathering their edges, and designing retention patches to face their narrow side into prevailing winds can also reduce wind damage. Tree losses to eruptive insect populations can be offset by maintaining mixed-species stands. Other potential treatments include stand thinning to aid natural tree defenses against bark beetles, and the application of biological pesticides (for example, Btk) to limit defoliation by lepidopteran larvae. Disturbances can break the inertia of mature, closed forest communities, allowing the recovery process to be populated by species and genotypes better suited to the new climate. Retaining advance regeneration and carefully selecting plant material for artificial regeneration can facilitate adjustment, reconfiguration, and transformation responses to forest disturbances.
What Resilient Forest Management Looks Like
Authors: Burton Philip J.
Published: February 2025

Several case studies feature progressive forest management approaches that are expected to be resilient in the face of socio-environmental change and uncertainty. Examples are presented for lands managed primarily for protection, multiple use, and timber production, supplemented by ecologically focused guidelines for resilient plantation management and the promotion of woodlands in urban and agricultural landscapes. Other cases highlight the return of cultural burning to public land co-managed with Indigenous people, and the use of reduced-impact logging and other forward-thinking policies in the management of tropical forest concessions. The examples highlighted are drawn from Australia, Canada, Gabon, Sweden, and the US; the approaches demonstrated should be widely applicable under similar circumstances elsewhere following place-based analysis and priorities. Common features among these case studies include adaptation to greater incidence of wildfire, drought, and storms, for which fuel-reduction (often through the use of prescribed fire), stand-thinning, and stand-conversion practices are employed. Forests often need to be restored to remedy long histories of exploitation and degradation, with an emphasis on promoting a diversity of vegetation and native tree species that are also adapted to a warmer climate. Diversity is also valued through planning in a landscape context that promotes wildlife and biodiversity as well as human health, safety, and well-being.
Forest Stewardship Based on Socio-Ecological Principles
Authors: Burton Philip J.
Published: February 2025

Resilient forest management embodies many of the principles of ecological forestry and complex adaptive systems. Those principles have been variously expressed in different ways, recognizing the critical roles of diversity, disturbance, spatial and temporal connections, and the potential for self-organization and adaptive evolution as important for the resilience of forests. The challenge for forest managers is to protect those attributes in forests while still garnering benefits from their many ecosystem services. All forest management is ultimately about managing human activities, so it must function successfully within the broader socio-ecological system and its associated sociocultural institutions, structures, and processes. Applying resilient forest management is always a unique place-based exercise that must be customized to local environmental constraints, forest attributes, management objectives, and stakeholder expectations. It makes sense for local communities to have a strong voice in the governance structure that frames those management decisions. Forests are rooted in place, and local people have the most to gain or lose from their manipulation. Community needs and desires vary with regard to forest benefits and desired characteristics of the future forest. Our ability to shape the forest according to those expectations is compromised by imperfect knowledge and much uncertainty, suggesting the need for a humble and flexible way forward, one of forest ecosystem stewardship rather than command-and-control management.
Introduction
Authors: Urban Matthias
Published: February 2025

This chapter provides a broad overview of topics in Central Andean linguistics. It introduces the past and present distribution of languages, highlighting the massive differences caused by language loss. The chapter sketches the emergence and development of descriptive and historical linguistics in the Central Andes, and shows the relevance of data from the area for linguistic theory. It explores how research on historical and areal linguistics (exploring contact phenomena) have contributed to an understanding of the relationship between language, culture, and society in the prehistoric past, and how sociolinguistic and anthropological research is contributing to understanding that relationship in the present day. The chapter also highlights the changeable sociolinguistic situation of those Central Andean languages that are still spoken, discussing the high degree of endangerment of the languages and measures taken against it.
Physical geography and cultural trajectory of the Central Andes
Authors: Kaulicke Peter
Published: February 2025

This chapter provides background information for the reconstruction of pre-Hispanic Central Andean history and its changing environments based on interdisciplinary data. The highly varied geography, ecology, and cultural diversity require a subdivision of the Central Andes into three parts: North, Center, and South. Each is characterized by naturally and socially connected landscapes that have often been victims to climatic impacts, which partially led to political collapse, but also to resilience and innovations. These conditions favored segmentary polities with only relatively late agropastoral expansive states or empires. In the North, where complex polities and cultures ensued in remarkable continuity until the 16th century. The Center is a kind of transition area, while the South is later in evolution, but dominant from ad 700/800 (Wari, Tiwanaku) to Inca. Regional perspectives and changing networks hence are crucial for the comprehension of this complex world without written sources.
Historical linguistics, philology, and the development of Andean linguistics
Authors: Cerrón-Palomino Rodolfo
Published: February 2025

Historical-comparative linguistics in the Andean area was born in the 1960s. Its development is closely related to the unfolding of descriptive and dialectological studies on its Indigenous languages, in particular Quechuan and Aymaran. Only later, once reconstructions had been proposed, did attention turn toward the documentary sources in search of evidence which would help to formulate alternative solutions, deal with unresolved issues, and obtain clarification and refinements. Thus, philological studies of the Andean area were initiated and employed in a rigorous intellectual examination of the colonial grammatical and lexicographic materials. In this contribution, I attempt to give an account of the development of linguistic-philological studies as they have come to be applied in the linguistics of the Central Andes, making a distinction between two phases of their interplay that are distinguishable through the nature of their interaction and the quality of their output.
Cuzco Quechua
Authors: Bendezú-Araujo Raúl , Acurio-Palma Jorge
Published: February 2025

This chapter offers a grammatical overview of Cuzco Quechua [ISO 639-3: quz, Glottocode: cusc1236], a Southern Quechuan language spoken in the southern Peruvian Andes by nearly 1.5 million speakers. Within the Quechuan family, Cuzco Quechua is probably the most studied language. However, the most relevant sources are written in Spanish (and one in French) and in editions that are no longer readily available. This sketch aims to offer a panoramic view of Cuzco Quechua grammar based mainly on the data of descriptive sources and lexicographic works. This data is supplemented with the authors’ experience working with the language, both a synchronic and a diachronic perspective.
Uru and Chipaya
Authors: Hannß Katja
Published: February 2025

Uru [ISO 369-3: ure, Glottocode: uruu1244] and Chipaya [ISO 369-3: cap, Glottocode: chip1262] together form the Uru–Chipaya language family, spoken on the Bolivian Altiplano. Uru fell out of use around 1950, while Chipaya is still spoken by approximately 1,800 people. The nature of their relationship remains unclear; other members of the language family became extinct almost undocumented. As described in this chapter, Uru and Chipaya are agglutinating with some fusional features. Their nominal case systems are comparable to those of Aymara and Quechua; the basic constituent order is SOV, although this is flexible. One peculiarity of the Uru and Chipaya verbal systems is that the subject is marked on the verb only in certain tenses and it is usually only a first-person that is indexed on the verb. Uru, but especially Chipaya, have several phrasal and clausal clitics, which express various pragmatic functions.
The Andean Spanish of Southern Peru and Bolivia
Authors: Ciudad Luis Andrade
Published: February 2025

The Andean varieties of Spanish spoken in Southern Peru and Bolivia share some distinctive traits. On the one hand, these are due to the influence of Aymara and Quechua, the Indigenous languages they have been in contact with for five centuries. However, although this influence is significant, they also show some features that are specific to the Spanish system, some of which can be considered to be remnants of ancient Spanish traits. In addition, some phenomena are exclusive of one of both countries or of specific areas within them. In this chapter, I summarize the main phenomena that characterize the Andean Spanish of Southern Peru and Bolivia at the different linguistic levels, and I argue that, from a dialectological point of view, both types of features, contact-induced and patrimonial, should be equally valued and studied.
Central Andean Segmental Phonologies in Continental Perspective
Authors: Michael Lev , Robertson Allegra
Published: February 2025

The idea that Central Andean languages differ phonologically from other South American languages has a long history, and has played an important role in claims for the existence of an Andean, or Central Andean, linguistic area. This chapter examines the phonological inventories of the Central Andean languages from a continental perspective, using a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods, and drawing on a comprehensive database of South American phonological inventories (SAPhon 2.1.0). From this wider perspective, Central Andean languages participate in three different, partially overlapping, areas: a large Western South American Phonological Area, as well as smaller Southern Cone and North-Central Andean Phonological Areas. Rather than forming a phonological area unto themselves, then, Central Andean languages participate in complexly overlapping and multi-lateral relationships of areality over large areas of western South America.
The Quechuan–Aymaran relationship
Authors: Emlen Nicholas Q.
Published: February 2025

The Quechuan and Aymaran languages have been spoken side by side in many places throughout history, and share many resemblances in their lexicons, phonological systems, and grammatical structures. Explaining these resemblances remains one of the most vexing and enduring puzzles in South American historical linguistics. In this chapter, I review how this topic has developed over the centuries. I present this history in four parts, beginning in 1653–1950, when observers simply took the resemblances between the families as evidence of descent from a common ancestor language. Next, in 1950–86, scholars working with more comprehensive data and more mature methods embraced contact to explain the most obvious resemblances between the families. The third period (1986–2010) illuminated the relative chronology of Quechuan-Aymaran contact, and since then, Andeanists have begun to reconstruct the processes of change. I conclude by suggesting a few steps that might lie ahead.
Language ideologies and the Quechuan family
Authors: Howard Rosaleen
Published: February 2025

The linguistic panorama of the Central Andes is interwoven with that of Western Amazonia. This chapter explores three related aspects of that relationship. First, we describe areal typological patterns that can be detected across the whole region and that reflect the deepest time depth available to our current methods. Second, we turn to the linguistic geography of the Andean–Amazonian transitional zone, both historically and in the present, revealing a more recent picture of the region’s languages. Third, we present two case studies of Andean–Amazonian linguistic connections: the Aymara–Puquina–Leko–Tacanan complex northeast of Lake Titicaca during the Inca period, and the multilingual Matsigenka–Quechua–Spanish frontier society of the Urubamba Valley in the 20th and 21st centuries. Together, these three perspectives illustrate the richness of Andean–Amazonian linguistic connections and their importance for understanding the linguistic panorama of Western South America.
Language and the Andean environment
Authors: Shapero Joshua
Published: February 2025

This chapter describes the relationship between language and environment in the Central Andes, and suggests directions and implications for future research on the subject. Because of the particularities of both communicative and environmental patterns in Central Andean societies, this relationship offers a number of surprises. The chapter begins with a theoretical reflection on the relationship between language and environment, then moves first to examine linguistic forms related to the environment in Central Andean languages (toponyms, location and direction markers, demonstratives, and spatial Frames of Reference), and second, ethnographic and historical data on environmental engagement in the Central Andes. Finally, the chapter suggests that the mutual interactions of language and environment in the Central Andes affords valuable opportunities for re-examining deeply embedded assumptions about the nature of language and sociality that have informed the study of language more broadly, both in and beyond the Andes.
Early Islamic Water Management in Northern Mesopotamia
Authors: Rayne Louise
Published: February 2025

This chapter summarizes the evidence for a peak in water management activities in early Islamic northern Mesopotamia. The former irrigation systems, from which the early Islamic water strategy developed, are reviewed and the situation that followed it discussed. Medieval hydraulic pathways remained embedded in the landscape of northern Mesopotamia until relatively recently, but since the latter part of the twentieth century the environment of Syria and Iraq has been rewritten. The remains of relict canals were rapidly removed between the 1960s and 1990s to make way for new, large-scale schemes, which replaced rain-fed cultivation.
A Tale of Two Services
Authors: Bramoullé David
Published: February 2025

The Fatimids (909–1171) set up an active and efficient navy. It is the image of a professional fleet, with rationalized organization and command, and concerned with innovation that emerges through the texts. These elements invite us to question the financing of the Fatimid fleet. In Egypt, the documentation makes it possible to better understand how the navy was financed. Sources testify to the development of a strategic raw materials purchasing system that relied on two public customs services called the Khums and the Matjar. This system, quite atypical for this period, enabled the Fatimids to design a navy that was the essential tool for legitimizing the universalist claims of the Ismaili dynasty in the face of its Sunni competitors.
Silent Partners
Authors: Reynolds Daniel
Published: February 2025

This chapter examines the role of Christians in the early Islamic economy between 750 and 1000. Challenging the tendency to examine Christians as a homogenous socio-economic population, this chapter takes a single case study, Christians in early Islamic Palestine, and examines how Christians responded to the shifting landscapes of power, settlement and economic activity in this region in the early Islamic period. In particular, it argues that the tendency to examine later Christian economic activity through the lens of Late Antique models has resulted in an underestimation of their presence and significance within early Islamic economic and fiscal systems. When examined closely, the evidence reveals the sensitivity of Christians and their related economic activities to the shifting role of land-use, taxation, and sedentary settlement in the post-Umayyad Bilād al-Shām.
The Middle East as Seen by the Arab Geographers (Ninth to Tenth Centuries)
Authors: Ducène Jean-Charles
Published: February 2025

While the Arabic geographical literature does not provide an exhaustive view of the Middle East during the ninth and tenth centuries, it nevertheless offers valuable insights regarding its economic evolution since Antiquity. Indeed, regardless of the type of literature (administrative, descriptive, or encyclopaedic), the geographers often examined the environments where people lived, in particular city life. In this sense, al-Iṣṭakhrī’s, Ibn Ḥawqal’s and al-Muqaddasī’s books are noteworthy. All these authors tended to focus more on the contemporary situation of the city, rather than its history. In these narratives the city is a place of power, an administrative centre, and a place of production and exchange. The major urban installations (mosque, palace, citadel, market) are identified. The road network is also described, sometimes in its original form, which allows the reader to understand how it evolved through time. Finally, this geographical literature provides a survey of routes of communication between cities and their hinterlands, which occasionally illustrates the regions’ rise and fall.
North-Eastern Mesopotamia as an Economic Area from an Archaeological Perspective
Authors: Nováček Karel
Published: February 2025

Archaeological data are still not usually employed for reconstruction of geography and dynamics of the trade in the heartland of the caliphate, as the Islamic archaeology in Iraq has not reached yet the necessary level of coverage and intensity. This case study is devoted to the province of al-Hidyāb (ancient Adiabene) and focuses on the trade infrastructure, particularly the spatial distribution, morphology, and hierarchy of centres involved in the production and exchange of goods, as well as on the regional geography of the transportation networks. A notable expansion of the urban system and route network during the Umayyad and early ʿAbbāsid period can be hypothetically linked with the intensification of agricultural production and commercial activity, reflecting not only the progress of the Islamic tamṣīr but, above all, a heyday of the Christian majority in the region.