Long known for its natural beauty, remoteness, and abundance of wildlife, the Mekong river basin runs through China, Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam. It is home to more than seventy million people and has for centuries been one of the world's richest agricultural zones. Today however it is undergoing profound changes. China's development policies aim to interconnect the region through high-speed transportation networks and to transform its people into modern urbanized consumers. By 2025 a series of dams will have harnessed the river's energy, bringing an end to its natural cycles and cutting off food supplies for over half

In this empirically rich collection of essays, a team of leading international scholars explore the way that economic transformation is sustained and challenged by everyday practices across Southeast Asia. Drawing together a body of interdisciplinary scholarship, the authors explore how the emergence of more marketized forms of economic policy-making in Southeast Asia impacts everyday life. The book's twelve chapters address topics such as domestic migration, trade union politics in Myanmar, mining in the Philippines, halal food in Singapore, Islamic finance in Malaysia, education reform in Indonesia, street vending in Malaysia, regional migration between Malaysia, Indonesia and Cambodia, and Southeast Asian

The bestselling author of The Professor and the Madman and The Map That Changed the World examines the enduring and world-changing effects of the catastrophic eruption off the coast of Java of the earth's most dangerous volcano -- Krakatoa.The legendary annihilation in 1883 of the volcano-island of Krakatoa -- the name has since become a byword for a cataclysmic disaster -- was followed by an immense tsunami that killed nearly forty thousand people. Beyond the purely physical horrors of an event that has only very recently been properly understood, the eruption changed the world in more ways than could possibly