Geography For Dummies

RESPATIALISING FINANCE ‘In Respatialising Finance Sarah Hall uses the internationalisation of the Chinese Renminbi (RMB) to work through a sympathetic conceptual and empirical critique of prevailing analyses of International Financial Centres (IFCs). Her conceptual (re)framing stresses the politics, institutions and economics of IFCs and will be essential reading for all social scientists interested in the dynamism of contemporary finance and financial centres.’Professor Jane Pollard, Centre for Urban and Regional Development Studies (CURDS), Newcastle University, UK‘Through detailed study of Chinese RMB internationalisation and combining analytical insights from economic geography, sociology, and international political economy, Sarah Hall shows why offshore networks anchored in territories such as the City of London are both core to global monetary and financial landscapes, and provide a key terrain for state power and politics.’Professor Paul Langley, Department of Geography, Durham University, UK Respatialising Finance is one of the first detailed empirical studies of how and why London became the leading western financial centre within the wider Chinese economic and political project of internationalising its currency, the renminbi (RMB). This in-depth volume examines how political authorities in both London and Beijing identified the potential value of London’s international financial centre in facilitating and legitimising RMB internationalisation, and how they sought to operationalise this potential through a range of market-making activities.The text features original data from on-the-ground research in London and Beijing conducted with financial and legal professionals working in RMB markets and offers an original theoretical approach that brings economic geography into closer dialogue with international political economy. Recent work on territory illustrates how financial centres are not simply containers and facilitators of global financial flows – rather they serve as territorial fixes within the dynamic and crisis-prone nature of global finance.

The Travels of Sir John Mandeville. Itinerarium libreka classics – These are classics of literary history, reissued and made available to a wide audience. Immerse yourself in well-known and popular titles!

There is no escaping the fact that the island biogeography of the North Atlantic Region is singularly peculiar. Sitting in the north of the Atlantic Ocean, these islands have been subjected to largescale shifts in climate over the last few million years, unlike the other island groups further south which were likely more buffered from the vicissitudes of Quaternary climate changes. Uniquely for a group of islands there is only one documented extinction in the North Atlantic (the Great Auk), and those in the insects are local events relating to species that are distributed throughout the Palaearctic region. Over half the insect species in Iceland and Greenland are introduced. The faunas, excluding Greenland, are predominantly of Palaearctic origin and have close affinities with the faunas of Scandinavia and the British Isles and. These unique physical and biological characteristics have interested biologists and biogeographers for centuries.  The key debates concerning the biogeography of the North Atlantic islands still rumble on: Do the biota reflect cryptic refugia or otherwise, or tabula rasa and recolonization? How important were human communities in shaping the existing biota and biogeographical patterns? Throw into this mix current concerns over global warming, and we can now ask, how resilient is the biota to change, either natural or anthropogenic? This volume draws together a range of researchers with longstanding research interests in the region, from diverse academic backgrounds, to evaluate some of these questions.