Temple Urbanism in Medieval South India
The Tamil country of South India experienced a flowering of political, economic, and cultural forces during the Chola period (849–1279). The environments supporting this expansion were nucleated settlements focused on temples, surrounded by verdant paddy fields with artificial irrigation networks. This article is a study of the sacred sites and nucleated settlements that were the heart of this medieval civilization. The purposes of the study are two: first, to portray the dynamics of early urbanism during a crucial period of regional integration in South Asia, and especially to portray the geography of early centers; second, to provide the basis for a comparative study of early South Indian urbanism and premodern urbanism in other world areas.
Breaching the nadu: Lordship and economic development in pre‐colonial South India
In this article I present a new framework for the analysis of the South Indian economy over the medieval and early modern epochs, centred on the effects of social property relations. I argue that the overall pattern was one of steady economic development, but with a marked increase in trade and commodity development in the early modern era. This is explained through a transformation of intra‐class relations that followed the fall of the Vijayanagara Empire. Whereas in the medieval period, economic growth had been subject to the constraints imposed by effective lordly cohesion, which squeezed peasant income and limited trade, this cohesiveness gave way under the hammer blows dealt to it by Vijayanagara rulers. As the South entered the early modern era, lords found themselves without the traditional mechanisms of class organisation, and producers were able to capitalise on their weakness for economic gain. Nevertheless, production still remained peasant based, and, pace some of the more ambitious claims of ...
French film theory and criticism : a history/anthology, 1907-1939
These two volumes examine a significant but previously neglected moment in French cultural history: the emergence of French film theory and criticism before the essays of Andr Bazin. Richard Abel has devised an organizational scheme of six nearly symmetrical periods that serve to "bite into" the discursive flow of early French writing on the cinema. Each of the periods is discussed in a separate and extensive historical introduction, with convincing explications of the various concepts current at the time. In each instance, Abel goes on to provide a complementary anthology of selected texts in translation. Amounting to a portable archive, these anthologies make available a rich selection of nearly one hundred and fifty important texts, most of them never before published in English.